Donna Tiger ~ We Love You

When I took this photograph Donna was probably 17 years old, a student at Palmetto Sr. High. A year or two earlier she'd cut her nearly waist length hair so it was now just below her shoulders. She, and most of the other Miccosukee girls, had started wearing make-up and wore the same fashions as the other girls. In addition to her beauty Donna stood out because of her height. She was probably about 5'10"

Color negative films back then were nowhere near as good as they are now. Color slides ruled and some of the big New York mail order places were importing "grey market" English and French made Kodachrome II and selling it for only $3.79 a roll including processing by Kodak. One big advantage of Kodachrome films is the long term stability of the dyes. Projecting them often would cause fading but stored in the dark the colors stayed true. On the downside the slide films in general had about no exposure latttude. You had to expose exactly right. For things like landscapes you could bracket your shot, making several exposures at slightly different settings. For photographing people or action there'd be too much chance that the best photo would have the wrong exposure, and there was no Photoshop back then to try to save one with a computer. Hell, nobody had a computer either!

I'm pretty sure that this shot was taken in my back yard in open shade. I was probably using a 105mm f/2.8 Vivitar T-4 lens on a Pentax body, shooting wide open. I loved the way that lens rendered the out of focus background. The last time I saw Donna was maybe a dozen years ago at her dad's funeral. I found out from Florence a couple of days ago that Donna had passed away earlier this year.

Florence also told me that her husband Spencer had died in 2005 and the oldest sister Linda had died in 2004. Of the five brothers and sisters that only leaves Janice, still living on the Brighton Seminole Reservation by Lake Okeechobee with her husband John Wayne Huff.