Katrina 5 Years Later – Images by Vincent Laforet

Today marks the 5-year-anniversary of Katrina hitting the Gulf Coast and the New Orleans levee breaking and flooding one of the most beautiful communities of this country.

This was easily the single most difficult assignment of my career as a photojournalist.  I saw many fellow colleagues – and most surprisingly hardened war photographers – break down as they covered this story.

When you’re overseas, it’s easy to distance yourself and say: “This would never happen back home.”

But when it hits this hard – this close to home – no professional journalist/photojournalist/human being can build up a strong enough emotional wall or “professional distance.”

It took me well over a year to get over the experiences and things I witnessed during my 10 days there.  I was one of the first photographers to get images out from Katrina as most were not able to get images (let alone Television feeds) out during the first few days without significant difficulty as almost everything was knocked out in a huge geographical area.

No one was prepared for what happened – what we saw – what we heard – what we witnessed.

I saw the very worst of humanity – and the very best – all in the span of minutes, several times a day.

In fact when I was asked to go back one year later,  I pleaded to be sent to Iraq instead.  That’s how close to home this assignment hit and how terrified I was of returning.

It was one thing to witness the disaster – but somehow even harder to go back and witness how little progress had been made one full year later.

I did eventually go back on the anniversary date to work on an essay that documented the frighteningly small amount of progress that had been made.  I have to admit that I fell into a pretty deep depression as a result and had to leave after just 6 days.

But what we as journalists felts is absolutely irrelevant.  I just mention it because at that point I had been a journalist for close to 15 years and documented a lot of tragic events around the world as a staff photographer for The New York Times- and this event knocked me out cold.

Can you imagine how hard this was for “regular” people who were not just witnesses – but right in the middle of all of this?

I honestly can’t.

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As I and many others guessed when this controversy popped up a few months ago – the whole H.264 End User Agreement “controversy” was indeed muchado about nothing.   Good to see MPEG LA do the right thing and clear the air.

For those who missed this little controversy from back in May please read this post. The issue was with the end user license agreement for H.264 which states that the format cannot be used for “professional” distribution.

This is something we could all have worried about as the Canon HDDSLRs all shoot their footage in the H.264 format.   But now:  we don’t.  So go back out and shoot – and always remember:  as awful as some of the language in contracts often sounds at first – most of the time you can go back and discuss it with the other party.   One of my favorite sayings is that “all contracts are meant to be negotiated.”

IMPORTANT NOTE (This applies to only footage that is put online for free – NOT FOR SALE.  See comments below for clarification and rates.)