This web site is about content. It has been the intent throughout to avoid time spent on bells and whistles. Too often, websites with promise, when finally downloaded, prove to be a meringue of effects surrounding little content. These hypertext markup language files are for giving everybody a heady whiff of nostalgia and that can't happen without prints being put up. The man-hours for this site, therefore, have been devoted to print preparation, not to fancy html code and effects. Complex html effects and endless links cannot compete with the delight experienced when looking into a window that opens out upon the vista of high school 45 years ago.
Neat-oh effects and links can come after all the pix are scanned, cropped, aligned, despotted, descratched, dodged out, burned in, have had their density curves redistributed, gammas curved selectively from place to place within the print, the size reduced, the image file compressed to the jpg standard, the file formatted for jif compatibility and then put up on this page. There are now over 200megabytes of negatives scanned, a hunk of work.
What has made this site possible is the advent of powerful and easy to use image editing software for the p.c. As they were, the negatives were of dubious quality. The prints at the reunion had the sole merit of nostalgia; they had no technical distinction! With their dirt and poor contrast, they would have been quite unsuitable for posting on the web. All the time associated with putting up this site, therefore, has gone into retrieving these old images to make them available to fellow alumni of Oak Bay High in the school years 1961-62 and 1962-63 and to members of the staff who desire a look back.
The dense negatives that originally could not be put up, mainly of basketball games and the cheerleaders and yell leaders that performed during them, have now been read in and put up using a state of the art negative scanner. Those images are available on the site now.
Colour frames made of the reunion in 1988 have not even been touched yet. They have disappeared into the maw of the storage garage. We have those to look forward to!
Hey, you're not supposed to be reading this stuff if you are bored! Skip on into the pictures.
