This website provides an index to links to photographs housed on Flickr, a photo repository that includes access to full original resolution jpeg photos.  I have uploaded some 50,000 photos of Louisiana Cajun, Zydeco, and Creole musicians/bands dating back to the late 1990s. I have also uploaded photos of rural Mardi Gras activities within about a 30 mile radius of Eunice, where I live.  

How the Photos Are Organized

The photographs are organized on Flickr into albums that typically contain shots of a band’s performance at one event.  That album is then placed in a collection with other albums containing photos of the band at other events.  In addition, albums of individual bands performing at festivals are placed in a festival collection along with albums of all the other bands that I photographed at the festival or event. I often write a note to introduce the album. In recent years, I have also copied that note to the description metadata for the first photo in the album. Flickr includes it as part of the information shown underneath that  photo. In addition to the file names, I have added keyword tags to most of the photos, so, in many cases, using the search bar in Flickr may be a more effective way of locating particular photos than the index of albums and collections on this web site.

No Charge for Using My Photos

I do not charge for use of my photos. Anyone, including, of course, the news media, is welcome to download photos for noncommercial use in providing information about the music and musicians and in promoting the Cajun and Creole cultures. Including a credit line with published photos is optional. In addition, anyone who appears in any of the photos can make any use of their photos even if the use is commercial.  However, anyone else using these images for commercial purposes needs to obtain permission from the persons depicted in the images. I have no problem with anyone using my photos to promote festivals or to publicize appearances of bands and musicians at music venues.  However any use that casts those in a photo in a “false light” (e.g, falsely implying endorsement of a commercial product or implying anything defamatory) is not acceptable.

How I Take and Process Photos

As of summer 2026, I am taking photos with a Nikon Z9 mirrorless camera. I mainly use Nikon 24-70/2.8, 24-120/4, and 14-30/4 Nikkor lenses. At age 79, I no longer want to contend with heavier lenses, so, since Lightroom and Photoshop can now do a good job enlarging portions of a cropped frame, I rarely use my 70-200/2.8 lens.  I do on occasion resort to using Lightroom or Photoshop software to add digital blur to the background of some images. I also use those software programs extensively to adjust lighting, and I sometimes digitally remove distractions like the headstock of a guitar intruding into the edge of the frame. In recent years, I have set my camera to auto iso all the time, making adjustments with the exposure compensation dial as needed.  I have been amazed by the ability of DxO PureRaw to eliminate noise in high ISO images without making the image too “plasticky.”  I almost never use flash.

For the first few years, my goal was solely to shoot photographs that I could use at low resolutions on the web.  I began with an early model digital camera, supplemented by scans of a few snapshots taken with a traditional camera.  After a couple of years, I purchased the first of several Nikon Coolpix cameras before moving up to a Nikon D100, D200, D3 in April 2008, D4 in June 2012, D5 in April 2016, and D850 in October 2017 (used mainly for Mardi Gras courirs), then the mirrorless Z9 in February 2022. I began shooting “raw” photos in 2008. The quality and the resolution of the processed jpegs improved over the years with improvements in the cameras I used and in the Lightroom and Photoshop software to process images. The download-pointing arrow in the lower right corner of photos on Flickr offers the option to save images at various resolutions including the original resolution.

In photographing the Rendezvous in the Prairie free music programs that began with the reopening of the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center in March 2025, I try to avoid distracting the audience.  I typically hold the camera in my lap and look at the lcd screen to frame the shot.  In July 2026, I began making audio recordings of each program using a small H1Essential Handy Recorder. From time to time, I plan to upload the audio for a song along with the photos. The sound quality is not very good, but I hope it might at least encourage listeners to come to the Rendezvous in the Prairie programs to experience the music in person.

David Simpson
Eunice
August 12, 2026