Computer file management only needs two ingredients to be successful: simplicity and a willing staff. Consider the system used in 2004-2005 at Shawnee Mission North High School. It was simple so the staff used it, and it aided grading.
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Photography
Whether we have a pleasant or a horrible experience creating a yearbook is not influenced by our quality of layouts or photographs. Most of us can even accept it and carry on if our page software occasionally does not behave. What really makes you despise or love this whole process is how organized you are.
Lower camera prices and higher pixel counts over the past couple of years have brought yearbook photographers out of the darkroom and into the light of computer monitors.
Trading in that 35mm camera for a film-less digital camera may be a way out of the darkroom but it is not necessarily the path to better yearbook photos. For the exchange to work, photographers need to understand the limitations of digital cameras and the advantages of using a combination of film and film-less technologies to handle a wide range of assignments.
I remember the first time I had to depend on a computer to help me create a yearbook. It was my first book and the staff told me it was easier to develop yearbook pages using the computer. At that time, I was completely computer illiterate and had every intention of staying that way. As far as I was concerned, computers were the spawn of you-know-where and I was having nothing to do with them.
Digital images are a hot commodity today with digital special effects showing up everywhere from magazines to television to movies to the Internet. More and more yearbook staffs are using digital images each year. It is truly the wave of the future in desktop publishing.
What do you mean Bubba won’t be in the football team picture?” screamed the angry father. “He was the team. Without him there would have been no postseason play. No championship. No Coach of the Year. No, no…”
An explosion of emotion, a click, and in 1/250th of a second, it’s history.
The sharp eyes and quick thinking of a photographer just captured a great yearbook photo on film. The sharp eyes and careful thinking of an editor will get it published.
