Since my return from a week in New Orleans, I’ve been asked to reflect on my experiences several times. Most often those reflections involve the obvious effects of community service, especially in post-Katrina New Orleans. However, I’ve found that when I’ve been asked to reflect on my experience as a photographer, the introspection has uncovered some interesting nuggets.

This was my first ‘real’ experience with photo-journalism and a week dedicated entirely to photographing a series of events. I thought I knew what to expect but, in retrospect, like most new experiences, it turns out I had no clue. It was exhausting!

At the end of day, I found myself feeling quite similar to how I used to feel after a long night of bartending- completely spent, both physically and mentally. Each day I was required to be ‘on’ from the moment I stepped out of my room until I was finally able to retreat back to it at night. Being ‘on’ requires constantly scanning the surroundings for points of interest, anticipating events, and putting myself in position to best capture those events. In addition, being able to ‘read’ people really well- being able to recognize their essence in order to best capture it, and determine what they are about and therefor likely to do. For anyone who has tended at a popular bar, this may sound familiar.

Despite being exhausting, it was a great opportunity to connect the parents to their kids by posting to my blog with a daily update on their activities. A few paragraphs accompanying a few photographs would help supplement the phone calls to home and provide tangible evidence for the swelling pride the parents were likely feeling. It would be easy, I was certain, since I had managed quick turn-arounds on my recent children’s portraiture sessions- a product of my increased efficiency using Adobe Lightroom.

My workflow, after importing all the photos, involves a couple phases of honing down to the best photos. That didn’t change here. But what did change was my target photo. I wasn’t just looking for the good photos of one or two kids, with good smiles, fun poses, or that memorable pout, I was looking for the gripping photos that told the story of the project, and hinted at history and hope. And I was looking for those photos that included each one of the kids! That process, it seemed, was going to take considerably longer than I was planning on.

A rough rule of thumb for time spent post-processing (editing photos after the session), is 1-to-1. In other words, spend as much time editing the photos as you do taking them. Prior to this trip I was in the neighborhood of 2.5-to-1, and working hard at getting more efficient. But given that my ’sessions’ in New Orleans were 8 hours or longer, I needed to drastically modify my post processing if I was going to succeed. And, I needed to learn that and adapt to it on the fly right off the bat.

My daily post-session goal was to select and process ~30 photos (out of the several hundred I had taken that day), upload those photos to my Flickr site and organize a slideshow of the day’s events, and post to my blog about the day. And with the exception of the last two nights, whose events conspired against me, I was able to produce. Granted I was usually up until after midnight, but I feel it was worth it. And the wonderful comments I got from some of the parents as the week went on served as fuel to keep me going.

As a photographer, it proved to be a great learning experience. As a human, it was enlightening and humbling. Most of my photos were taken and posted with the expressed purpose of documenting the students’ week. However, there were a few I took that did not involve the kids but rather, collectively and from my perspective, portrayed the essence of New Orleans. I’ve put them together in a slideshow, and show a few select favorites here: