Historic Hood River
Children’s Orchestra
3-16-2021
Notes
This image is captioned “Children’s Orchestra at Children’s Concert, Hood River Music Festival, August 1948.
Even today most color prints are not particularly color fast. Unless you spring for archival inks and UV glass frames every print will change color relatively quickly. This is a Kodacolor print. I can partially correct this fading and color shift digitally, but this is a good excuse to remind you that if you have negatives of old family photos, keep them! I can almost always get a better scan out of a negative than a print.
Charlott
I am not sure, but think this was part of the “Bridge of the God's” week end. If it was this was on Sunday. There was also the children's choir that sang a couple of songs. I remember we sang “Finlandia”. Probably because there were a lot of Hood River Finnish people who were very involved in the Hood River Music Assn. I imagine that these were students of Boris Sirpo. The photo isn't that good of quality to see if any of those musicians can be identified. This photo was taken on the bleachers on the north side of the old Hood River football field, as that is where the pagent the night before took place with the stage at the west end of the field. It was quite the week end for Hood River city and valley residents. Took a lot of hard work and dediction to put it altogether.
Alan Winston
I've been intrigued at how moderately-good some of the newer colorizing software has gotten, albeit by speculating without any claim to historical accuracy. I have frequently wondered why I haven't come across something that modifies that software to work with old/poor color images, with user selection of the degree of speculation. In my own experimentation, I have converted color to black and white, then colorized and compared to the original. I probably should have googled before writing this, but it is time for my nap, and I'll have forgotten afterwards.
ArthurB
Alan, Photoshop and Lightroom can do a reasonable job rebalancing the color channels in most situations, but sometimes the color is just gone and there is nothing to bump up and rebalance. I experimented with this one and the results were passable, but I decided to tell the story of how prints fade instead.