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OK, this one may be a little "out there," but I have seen it reported enough that I am guessing there are more than a few of these folks around. They are called "Freegans," which means they don't eat meat and they don't pay for their food. Instead, they salvage food from restaurant and grocery dumpsters and seem to have quite a lot to choose from.

Freegans even have a Web site that shows the best dumpsters to hit in several cities around the country. I can only imagine how thrilled the retailers are to be listed.

Use Frappr to see what Freegans worldwide have to say.

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Muslims Prepare for Ramadan

My friend Waliya Lari who is Muslim and a producer at KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City, dropped me an e-mail with some great ideas. She writes:

• Donating to Islamic charities: One of the five pillars is Zakat: giving 2.5 percent of your net worth to charities. Most Muslims make this donation during Ramadan. After 9/11, numerous Islamic charities have come under investigation, and now many Muslims are weary about giving to Islamic charities because of fear of becoming the subject of a terror-financing investigation. The Washington Post published a story on this topic last year.

• Muslim college students: In order to fast from sunrise to sunset, most people get up and eat before dawn and then eat after dusk. Some university and college dorms/cafeterias open up for special hours for fasting students who live on campus. Others offer prepackaged meals. Interestingly, the U.S. Department on State has information on its Web site explaining to Muslim students how they can celebrate their Holy Days on college campuses.

• Middle school lunchtime: Most Muslims start fasting around middle school age, so what do they do during lunchtime? Some hang out in the library, others hang out in the cafeteria with their friends, watching them eat. It'd make a good story to spend the lunch hour with some fasting middle schoolers, especially since it might be the first time for some -- and that's always hard.

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Take 25 Minutes to Watch This

Trust me on this. The Times-Picayune has pulled together a two-year retrospective of the Hurricane Katrina coverage told through the eyes of the photographers who covered it. The story includes images you likely have never seen before. You will hear stories from photojournalists who had to make life and death decisions about the people they were covering.

Some of these stories I have heard from the photographers themselves, in workshops and private conversations. Most are new to me.

One of the most memorable lines in the piece comes from photojournalist Ted Jackson who says, "This storm would not let you not take pictures. It compelled you to do what you did best and to me it was to take pictures of what I saw around me. I shot pictures in self-defense because there was nothing else I could do." 

Photojournalist John McCusker says, "I sit with a police radio on my desk and I listen to police calls all day. You know what I hear? "29-S, 29-S, 29-S." Suicide. You hear them all day long. It is like an epidemic. But it is a quiet one. So Katrina is still churning out its victims two years later, there are still people dying from this storm."

Print, broadcast, online and school newsrooms: Find the time to show this to your staff and students. I suspect I will be using it a lot when I teach members of the public why the press is still important.

I interviewed Danny Bourque, who produced the video, by e-mail.

What did you want to achieve with this piece of work? After two years, what was the story that the paper/Web site still had not told?

Danny Bourque

Let me start off by saying that I've been employed by The Times-Picayune for but one year now, so I was not present when Katrina struck the city. In the years that followed Katrina, the newspaper produced some great "Then and Now" pairs of photos that show the difference in time between two identical locations. The paper also followed the stories of specific subjects over time and kept readers updated with what was happening to them. Irwin Buffet, who is in the film, is a good example of that. 
When I first starting working at The Times-Picayune, I began to learn who each photographer was and realized that many of them were responsible for the images I had seen coming out of the city immediately after Katrina hit. At that time I was really curious about what they had to go through and how they managed to survive under such incredible circumstances and yet still shoot great pictures.  Of course I couldn't just ask hard-hitting questions out of the blue. For the same reason you wouldn't interrogate a war veteran about his personal experiences in battle, I did not question them unless the subject came up on their own accord -- which was extremely rare. As the second anniversary approached, I came up with a valid excuse to pursue such questions. I would produce a video documentary interviewing each photographer about their experiences so that their own stories could become part of the Katrina record. I think it is important for people to realize that the pictures and stories that came out of post-Katrina New Orleans had to come from journalists who were there too.


I want to ask a few production questions. The background appears to be chroma-key, not unlike what we see TV weathermen use. How did you get that look?



We used a green background and chroma-keyed it to become transparent, exactly like the TV meteorologists use. Assistant photo editor Andrew Boyd helped me set this up and further aided in my convincing the photographers that they should be interviewed. I know at least a few of them were not so eager to be a part of it at first and to have to dredge up all their old memories anew.


Tell me about how you organized your work on this piece. You must have had thousands upon thousands of images to sort through. How did you do it?

In the Times-Picayune photo department we are able to access a digital database of photos that goes back several years. By searching between the dates of Aug. 28, 2005 and, say, Sept. 30, 2005, the database will bring up hundreds of photos taken during that time, which happens to have been the Katrina aftermath. So I had plenty to work with. With the help of photo editor Doug Parker, we came up about four pictures per photographer that had the most interesting stories behind them. 
During my interviews I would ask questions directly about those photographs with the corresponding photographers who took them. This was really just a starting point, though, since once I sat down to interview the photographers, many more stories came to light that I hadn't anticipated. After I interviewed everyone, I went back to the database to find even more photos that I could use to illustrate all the stories I had been told. In the end I probably used about a hundred photos in the final piece, but there are so many more I could have used. I had seven hours of interviews and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of photos to work with. During the editing process I had to make difficult decisions about which stories were worth keeping and which ones had to be dropped.
Video is a very different medium compared with photography or the printed word, and I had to best serve the medium I was working in. My main goal was to tell a concise, yet accurate, depiction of events. Sometimes I had to sacrifice brevity over accuracy, or the other way around. In the end I think it tells the truth, or at least as close to the truth as I could hope to get without having been there.


I can imagine that everything this project involved -- just sitting there and editing the story, staring at those images again two years later and listening to the stories of life and death -- took a toll on you and the staff, creating a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. Did you encounter that as you were working on this?

A couple photographers I interviewed had used the past two years to distance themselves from the events of Katrina, so having to suddenly talk about it again made them noticeably uncomfortable. One photographer, once his interview was over, said he thought the interview was even better than therapy! So I suppose reliving the Katrina experience affected each person differently. As for myself, it was draining to have to listen to and edit seven hours of mostly depressing stories. I mean, the final video isn't something you would want to watch at a party. The whole time I was just hoping that I was representing the photographers accurately and that they would, in the end, approve of how I edited their stories together. I knew that this project was going to be one of the most powerful video pieces I would ever make and that it was important to stick with it to the end. After dragging eight people through mental terrain they would most likely rather forget, I was definitely under pressure to produce something good enough to warrant their sacrifice.


Will online users sit and watch a 25-minute story? What has your traffic shown you?


We have the video hosted on Google Video, and to date it has counted over 4,000 views.  We've also received a torrent of comments from people through e-mail or on bulletin boards, the best of which I have compiled onto this Web site: http://bourquefilms.brinkster.net/eyesofthestorm/index.html.

There are so many lessons in this online film that speak to the power of the image. The film speaks to the power of multimedia online storytelling. It speaks to the responsibility that journalists have in time of crisis. And, you will be moved by the section of the story in which the photojournalists arrive at the convention center, where thousands of people are huddled and one woman cries out, "The press is here." It was their first sign of hope.


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