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“So here I am, still in New Orleans. And I’m reinventing myself. I won’t say it isn’t hard – it’s very hard to start over, especially in the same place. The experts say New Orleans won’t be back to the way it was for another 15 or 20 years, that’s how huge the damage is from Katrina. Sixty percent of my clients came from an area called Lakeview. If you go to Lakeview today, it’s like Katrina was yesterday there. Everything is still decimated. When that kind of rot and ruin gets down into your soul, it’s hard to get it out .. but we are trying. Right now, we need the media to understand all the good things that have happened here in the last few years, all the beauty that’s still here in New Orleans. We need people to come back here.”

“Once you live through a catastrophe like Katrina, you realize how valuable peoples’ memories truly are. For example, Katrina has given me a different outlook on releasing archived files to my customers. I now feel a huge responsibility to properly preserve my images. I feel it’s a necessity to print out the images and put them in beautiful album, to back up my files off site, and to give clients a back up CD or DVD that they can keep in their safety deposit boxes. Not to take the place of the album, never that: but just as an added precaution, should the unthinkable occur again. No, albums are way too important to the business of photography to ever be replaced by CDs. They’re one sure way photographers can make more money. Digital has hurt the perceived value of photographers. Albums can counter that. We have to learn the new albums, selectively adopt them into our line, and introduce them to our customers with new services. For example, I sell a Kids Club program with Nouveau peel and stick albums. We do a shoot every few months and fill a page or two in the album. By the time the kids are five, we’ve filled two albums. Then I sell that same family on a 12 year program, with a single yearly session for ages 6 through 18. The album grows as the kids grow, and is an integral part of building a long term relationship and bringing them back into the studio.”

“Yes, Katrina changed things for me, but then, so did digital, for all of us. There are so many new photographers out there now, and honestly, they just don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know lighting, they don’t know posing, they don’t know composition. They have no depth to their work, and they seem to be afraid of studying and working hard to learn what they don’t know. They just point and shoot, and then spend hours and hours and hours trying to fix things in Photoshop. That’s not art to me. If you learn the rules, then break them knowingly, that’s art. Breaking the rules without even knowing them … well, that’s just sloppy. To me, it’s an honor to be invited to shoot a wedding, to be part of the most important day in a client’s life. I believe photographers have a responsibility to orchestrate and create the wedding, not just capture it. It may be the clients’ wedding, but it’s your story to tell. That’s what worked for me before Katrina, and that’s what’s working for me again.”