Senior Sophia Furth is a photographer in Yearbook, for which she goes out to take pictures of New Ulm High School events. Sports events, clubs, dress-up days, and other school events and achievements are captured by her and the team of student photographers to be placed into the pages for the year’s yearbook.
“There are a variety of jobs in yearbook, the most public would be photographer because you are attending events to take pictures. Otherwise, we do have students that sort and label pictures which is extremely helpful because we take so many at events,” Furth said.
Snapping photos, labeling and organizing them, and setting up the page layout are all done by students. With 15 people in yearbook, this process of creating has become rather streamlined.
However, the process of creating the yearbook wasn’t always so simple, and student involvement was very limited. In an interview with Barry Dufault of Dufault Publishing, the company that does New Ulm High School’s yearbooks, Dufault explained to me how new technology changed the way that students and the publishing company worked on creating school yearbooks.
“When I first started working with yearbooks back in 1996, schools would use a program called Adobe Pagemaker to create layouts and design. The program was not online so it needed to be downloaded to the computer. Each computer that had the program on it needed to have a license, so this limited the number of students who could actually work on the yearbook,” Dufault said.
He also mentioned that students needed to develop their own photographs in a darkroom, which limited the amount of photographs that were able to be placed into the yearbook. If you compare the 1996 and 2008 yearbooks, you can see the ‘96 spread has fewer pictures than the single page in the 2008 yearbook.
In 2008, many companies switched to online creation platforms to create yearbooks, which don’t require a license to use. Digital cameras and the online program gave students the ability to take and upload, edit, label, and organize photos and page layout whenever, wherever – so long as there was an internet connection, that is.
“Since we don’t have to worry about program license fees, we can have as many students on the staff as we want,” he said. “All who want to be involved can join.”
