Where’s Waldo?

Click on the image to download a single large scan.

About the photo

by Dennis Wesserling

The photo was taken during the Summer of 1991. I remember all of us in the building being shuffled out to the patio so that Mike Soper’s photo crew could get the shot. I seem to remember Mike directing the crowd while standing on a ladder and speaking through a bullhorn. A few weeks after the picture was taken everyone at Design Staff received a nice 17″ x 25″ glossy copy of it. Unfortunately, sometime throughout the years my copy disappeared, but there has to be several hundred copies of it out there somewhere. I see another familiar face every time I zoom in for close inspection of the picture.

Several month’s ago I received an email from retiree Nick Houvras. He wondered if I, or anyone for that matter, still had a copy of the photo. It was then that I included in my Muldoon’s Lunch Bunch reminder email a request to borrow a copy of the photo from anyone who might have one. Rich Barbour came through. He still had his copy safely stashed away at his home.

It was quite a job to scan and process the photo. Being of such large size I had to scan it in eight segments, not to mention the fact that Rich had stored the photo rolled-up, so it was a challenge to keep the document in position. I used a fairly high resolution to scan: 300 dpi. The work got a bit tedious when I used my photo processing program to join all of the segments back together digitally, trying to make the seams where the pieces join as invisible as possible. A tug here, a stretch there, shift a bit, etc. When completed I saved the photo in .jpg format. It’s almost 4MB and measures 5100 x 3300 pixels.

The gallery consists of the large scan broken up into twelve images, 1,000 pixels across.