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Ada High School
Ada, Oklahoma
Along with Wade Watkins, I was co-head photographer of the yearbook during my senior year, 1987-1988. At the end of the school year, I kept all the yearbook’s photo negatives because I am convinced they would have been thrown away otherwise. Only a fraction of these photos made it into the yearbook, so most of them have never been seen by the student body.
I think all the photos were taken from about August 1987 through March 1988. Ada was a 4-year high school back then, so these photos might be of interest to anyone in the classes of 1988-1991.
The collection contains 2,778 black and white negatives and 235 color negatives. They mostly consist of sporting events, pep rallies, candids, portraits, club group photos, and advertising photos. They do not consist of anyone’s official individual class photo.
I would like to digitize these photos in time for my class’s 30th anniversary reunion in 2018. I cannot pay for this by myself, so I am asking for contributions. I’m not interested in making a profit.
I have done extensive research into the technology, available services, and cost.
Photo negatives, especially black and white negatives, are always full of scratches and blemishes which aren’t noticeable when printed onto photo paper in the darkroom, but stand out when digitized, and it’s very annoying. I have scanned some of the yearbook negatives using my own standard scanner at home, and I can confirm that they are indeed very scratched.
When it comes to color negatives, this isn’t a problem. Everyone who scans color negatives uses Digital ICE (Image Correction and Enhancement). This is standard in the industry.
But Digital ICE does not work on black and white negatives. Each company tells the same story: we’ll digitize your black and white negatives, but they’ll contain scratch marks, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
There is one exception. ScanCafe has a chemical patent-pending process which cleans scratches from black and white photos. Of course, this makes them more expensive than the competition (by almost $1,000 for this project), but I believe it’s worth it. If I’m going to digitize them, I’d rather spend the extra money to do it well.
I have never used ScanCafe, but I love their prices and they have good reviews overall. No one else offers to clean black and white negatives, and that is a huge matter, in my opinion, so I would like to hire them.
To digitize all photos, and to ship the negatives there and back, I estimate will cost $2,660 total. That’s 89 cents per black and white negative; 33 cents per color negative; about $17 to ship the negatives each way; and $77 overhead for Fundrazr. The negatives are in a 3-ring binder and weigh about 5 pounds, and ScanCafe has a relationship with UPS which makes everything easier.
ScanCafe allows me to delete up to 20% of the photos and not pay for them, but I don’t anticipate deleting many photos, so I think any savings gained this way will be negligible.
Once I place the order, the project would take 4 to 6 weeks to complete.
Most of the photos were taken by me, Wade Watkins, and Darin Ross. I’m pretty sure Malia (Davison) Love took a few.
The sheets are sometimes marked with handwriting I cannot read (I’ll blame Malia for that, she was in charge). I can’t tell what some of the photos are, so I would be as surprised to see them as anyone else.
If you know any alumni who have not heard of this, please let them know.
Thanks,
Douglas Neman
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Updates will be posted on the Class of 1988's Facebook group page
https://www.facebook.com/groups/528208233969521/
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If you want to read about ScanCafe's black and white negative scanning, here you go:
https://www.scancafe.com/services/black-white-scanning
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