Mississippi Shrimp Boat, 1974

A retired photographer once advised me to simply take lots of pictures of everyday life.

In the late 1960’s I began to use fully adjustable cameras and by the early 1970’s had become more serious about photography. I had learned to develop my own negatives and print my own prints – even though I was not particularly good at it. I also began to try to take pictures just for the sake of getting a “good” picture.

I don’t know why I took this photo of a shrimp boat in 1974. It is negative number 7 on a roll of Panatomic X and was probably developed in D76. The camera was almost certainly my old Konica T2 fitted with its 52mm Hexanon lens. As it turns out, no print was made from this negative until just recently. Perhaps it was too simple a scene. It is not a particularly great photo. The sky is a bit overexposed and typically drab. After scanning the negative, Photoshop was able to recover a bit of detail in the sky. It looks better in sepia – to me, anyway.

But now, this simple photo is important because the shrimp boat (probably) no longer exists, the harbor has changed extensively and it is one of the few photos that I have from that area in those days. As a result, this photo looks very good to me now.