This past January, I took a tour of the renovated High School. It was an amazing sight to see but as I was looking over the years of Senior panels hanging in the lobby I thought to myself... these panels are in poor shape, if something isn't done to preserve what is left of them, they may become so deteriorated that they could not be saved. After some conversation with the Superintendent, It was agreed that the panels should be preserved somehow and with the large size of the panels it would be a costly or close to an impossible task to scan each panel. The next best thing came to mind and that was to digitally photograph each panel and correct or retouch anything that was missing or torn up.
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| 1964 BHS Senior Panel |
One example of the digital restoration was the 1964 panel. It was damaged by water during the gymnasium fire in the 1990's. The photos were badly damaged, so in order to correct what was damaged, a 1964 yearbook was used to copy Senior photos from. All photos were placed on a new background along with all the names and the school key. It was a mix of original photos along with the newly created ones. Each photo was hand placed on a grid to get the original look and layout. The panel was then optimized for brightness and contrast to give it a fresh look. Although not a perfect copy of the original, I felt it was a vast improvement. The same was done to the 1965 panel which had been damaged in the same manner.
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1965 BHS Senior Panel
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Although the black and white Senior panels were sometimes hard to reconstruct, I found the color panels beginning in 1977 to be more challenging. Some photos were faded by sunlight, some were missing or ripped and other had water damage. Taking one panel at a time sometimes took a couple weeks to redo to make presentable. But then came the year 1988. In years past, the panels, though some of them were in bad shape had a professional look to them. The 1988 panel was different. Not only did it look unprofesssional, it looked as if a group of unsupervised pre-schoolers were given scissors,colored pencils and glue to put it together. Then I looked at the 1989 panel and found it the same way. This went through the 1993 panel and then in 1994 the professinal look came back to the panels. It wasn't anything that the school had done to the panels it was the studio that put these panels together that made them look so shabby and unkempt. You could tell the photos were not all the same size and not grid to a background to make them even in rows. There was no imagination to these panels, looking like they all came from the same cookie cutter. It must of been the first attempt by Ruth Kelly Studios to make a Senior panel.
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1988 BHS Senior Panel
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It may just be me, but I look at the panel on the left and think cheap and not designed well. I felt the photos needed some punch to jump from the panel so I placed each one on a black background and centered them to a certain point. I hope the 1988 class enjoys what I did otherwise they can have their original back along with it's cheap look. Senior panels should be something to be proud to show off. Apparently Ruth Kelly Studios didn't think so at the time but this isn't the last panels done by the studio for BHS. They were called again in 1996 and have been doing Barnsdall's Senior panels since. All I can say is......the must be in the budget?
