Chris Bickford

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/us/10orleans.html?hpw

Doing an assignment for a daily national, especially one in a different time zone, is no walk in the park. Especially when the event you’re supposed to be covering starts at 5 PM and your first deadline is at 3:30 PM. Do the math on that one…

So the assignment from the New York Times was to cover the “Dat Tuesday” victory parade for the Saints, starting at the Superdome and ending at the Convention Center, both sites of national tragedy five years ago, now reclaimed by the hometown sports heroes…We thought we’d be smart and get an Air Card so that we could hunker down in the parking garage by the Superdome and upload from the car as pics came in from the beginning of the parade. What we didn’t count on is that during events of this magnitude, the cell towers in the area get overloaded and phone service just shuts down. Every now and then my phone would work, and I’d have voice messages from my assistant Federica saying “where are you”, and voice messages from the Times editor saying, “Where are the pictures?” The stress hormones were raging through my body as I tried to hunt down Federica, who had gone walkabout from the car trying to find a better signal, while trying to capture a photo that would be worthy of National’s faith in me to “get the shot”…I got plenty of good ones, but mostly of parade-watchers waiting for the parade to start. I finally had to settle for a shot of a Marine waving a huge Saints flag at the beginning of the parade. Then I had to high-tail it back to the car, 4-wheel it through the back streets of New Orleans from the Superdome to my apartment in the Tremé, and upload the six pictures we’d deemed good enough for publication. Once done, I called the editors, informed them of my status, and hopped on the bike to try to catch the rest of the parade as it headed down Canal street and then took a right at Convention Center Boulevard.

I sped down Rampart, in the damp, below-40, windy New Orleans night, cut through the quarter, locked my bike up somewhere around Bourbon Street, and tried to push my way through the crowds to cross the barricade, where my press pass would grant me free and easy access. But no dice. The folks in the crowd didn’t give a rat’s ass who I was or what newspaper I was shooting for. “Shoulda gotten here earlier here, bro, like we did” was the general response I got. My retort of “Dude, I’ve been working on this thing since noon” fell on deaf ears…There was just no getting through. It was like that Who concert where people got trampled…or was that a Stones concert…

I got back on the bike and headed down to the riverfront, thinking I might be able to catch Drew and the boys at the corner of Canal and Convention Center Avenue, but had the same problem there. New Orleaneans are the sweetest people in the world until you try to butt in front of them along a parade route…This one pretty woman offered to help me get through, grabbed my hand and started pulling me to the front, saying that I was a photographer with the New York Times and I had to get through. We got about four or five rows deep, and then no dice. “Go back to New York” one smartass cracked. “Dude, I live here too”, I said, which is only half true, but I thought it would help. “Yeah, everybody’s got a line, buddy, and yours ain’t workin’ “….

In the end I had to settle for a few rungs up on a fire truck, where they let me hang precariously from a metal handle as I waited for the MVP float to come through….with my free hand I had to get my telephoto lens out of my backpack, switch lenses, and hold the camera up with a 7-pound lens on the end of it, trying to hold it steady enough to get a clear shot in the near darkness…all the blood had drained out of both of my arms, the one holding on to the fire truck, the other trying to hold my camera to my eye….finally the Bacchus float with Drew Brees, Reggie Bush, and the rest of the “big boys” turned the corner and I managed to fire off a few AP-style telephoto shots of the guys throwing beads off the float. I thanked the firemen and headed back to my bike.

It was approaching the final deadline for the second edtiton, and I thought maybe I should just head back, but then I thought better of it and figured I should give it one last shot. So I rode further down Convention Center Boulevard, locked my bike up against the fence of the Hilton parking lot, and tried again to muscle my way through the crowds. The crowd was a little thinner here and much more polite, and I easily made my way onto the parade route. From there it was just a matter of keeping my badge prominent and squatting down into the crowd every time a marching band passed with their huge banners that spanned the width of the road. I kept sneaking down towards the Bacchus float, finally getting alongside it. I followed and circled around it as the boys threw beads and high-fived fans…until finally I found myself in the right place and the right time to get the shot above. Unfortunately I was shooting jpeg to get the shot in quicker and make sure my buffer didn’t seize up on me, so the color is not as good as I would like. But it’s a “moment” for sure…f/8 and be there right? Well, more like f/2.8 at 1600 with an off-camera flash AND be there..

Though it was great to get an assignment with the Times for the parade, I can’t help thinking how many REALLY great shots I could have gotten if I had just been able to follow the parade on my own from beginning to end. I already had a place on St. Charles Circle where the light was going to be long and golden around 5:30 or so, just before sunset, with a backdrop of flags hanging from a building and, I’m sure, confetti…and then at twilight, my favorite time to shoot…Man, the photos I could have gotten. At that moment I was, of course, frantically uploading round one of the photos from my apartment.

Racing back home in the freezing night (there were lots of comments that day about “hell froze over” since nobody thought the Saints would EVER make it to the super bowl, much less win), I came down with a chill that has taken me 48 hours to shake. But I finally got the photos uploaded, and then I took Federica out for a burger for being a trooper and being such a good support team, even though mostly what she did was experience frustration at the Air Card not working. I couldn’t have done it without her help.

Yesterday and today have been pretty quiet here in New Orleans. All of tonight’s parades have been canceled due to a “winter storm watch” which in New Orleans just means that it’s cold and rainy, and nobody wants to stand outside in the cold and wet watching the gorgeous Muses parade by catching pneumonia in their scanty outfits. Tomorrow doesn’t look much better, but come Saturday it will probably be balls to the wall until Mardi Gras. I’m not completely over my cold, but I’ll have plenty of time to recover after Tuesday. I’ll try to send a few updates over the weekend, but it may all have to wait until after. It’s going to be hard enough just keeping pace with it all.

Please check out writer Campbell Robertson’s great article, and my, well, passable photos–click on the “multimedia” window to check out the slideshow:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/us/10orleans.html?hpw