Deschutes history museum is colorizing some historic photos

The Deschutes Historical Museum is busy cataloging and digitizing its vast photo collection, and some of the old black and white photos are getting colorized, bringing the county’s history to life.

The museum currently has 35,712 items listed as photos, which primarily include film, print photographs, photo post cards, photo albums and negatives. In addition to that, there are at least 400,000 negatives from The Bulletin that are currently being cataloged, and a few of those have been scanned into the historical society’s digital archive. Some of the colorized photos are being shared on the museum’s Facebook page.

The vast amount of photos makes the job a bit daunting, and the museum could absolutely use volunteers to help with the process, said Kelly Cannon-Miller, the executive director of the historical society.

The museum has been digitizing materials since 2000, including various forms of film, she said. It’s part of the museum’s efforts to preserve Deschutes County history — and the job won’t be finished any time soon.

“We are going to be going through them for the rest of our lives,” Cannon-Miller said. “For 23 years volunteers have been scanning photographs and loading them in.”

When it comes to the colorization — which is done using artificial intelligence powered computer technology — it takes some historical sleuthing to ensure the newly colorized photos are historically accurate, Cannon-Miller said.

“That is the tricky bit, isn’t it?” Cannon-Miller said of the process. “More often than not we are relying on the AI’s algorithms for reading the gray scale. I think there are other tools at our disposal though.”

Cannon-Miller said part of the process is going back to the museum’s archives and searching through other artifacts from the photo’s time period, such as a Sears catalog, or tracking down common paint colors that would have been used at the time. Sometimes there are written descriptions of different buildings and areas that can be consulted to help ensure accuracy.

“A lot of it is uncharted territory for us,” Cannon-Miller said. “So you do have to draw back to those usual standards of what colors were likely available to them to paint a building. Do we have any other pictures? Do we have a description?”

Steve Stenkamp, a volunteer who works the front desk at the museum, spends some of his down time repairing photos and colorizing others using an AI-powered app called MyHeritage, which automatically generates a colored image from a black and white photo. After the AI does its magic, Stenkamp will tweak the colors in Photoshop after analyzing the color images and determining their historical accuracy.

“My dad grew up here, and my grandfather had been here since 1912, so this old stuff is something I’ve always been fascinated with,” Stenkamp said. “And this was something I started three or four years ago. I would get some black and whites and kind of see how it worked and sometimes you’d get some results and sometimes you didn’t.”

One photo he was colorizing recently was taken of Mirror Pond looking toward Drake Park. In the black and white image, it doesn’t look as though there is much going on along the banks of the river. But add some color and things start to appear.

“You can tell it’s a free-flowing river. I mean you can see the little rapids and ripples you don’t see now because it’s a pond,” Stenkamp said. “The interesting thing, you can kind of see stuff in there, you don’t know what it is, but when you colorize it then all of a sudden it blooms up and you can see all of the cabins and tents and buildings that were in Drake Park at that time. And it doesn’t show in the black and white.”

In another photo, a black and white image of a playground in Juniper Park in

the 1960s or ’70s instantly came to life in color, giving the image an entirely new dimension.

A colorized image of early Bend resident Kate Rockwell, better known as Klondike Kate, shows off the intricate details of her dress.

Again and again, Stenkamp fed images into the program and out came something deeper and more detailed.

The photos, which come from a verity of sources, are categorized and kept in a fireproof vault to ensure they remain preserved, said Rebekah Averette, the museum’s collections manager.

Averette said most of the photo collection is from the turn of the 20th century up until the 1940s. The collection of Bulletin negatives were primarily taken from the 1970s until the 1990s and the early 2000s.

Averette said she hears people locally say they do not think their personal family photographs — usually from the past 50 years — are historical in nature, but as far as the museum is concerned, that is not the case, she said.

“One of the things we are trying to do is to educate people that history is being made in the moment,” Averette said. “So, your photographs from 2000, those are the kinds of things we want to keep. Because maybe they don’t seem super significant now, but in 20 years those are the kinds of things we are going to want to look back on.”

Averette said the collection is lacking years between the 1950s up until the ’90s, and said she is hoping locals in Deschutes County will consider donating their personal photos to the museum. Once they are scanned into the system they will be returned to their owners, Averette said.

“I think a lot of times there is a little bit of a misconception about the kinds of things that we might or might not be interested in,” Averette said.

Averette said as far as the museum is concerned, someone’s old family photos can be an invaluable resource to understanding the area’s past. She said the museum is also looking for longtime locals who can identify people and places from different time periods from photographs.

“We can find photos from around that time that show the street they are looking at and you can see business signs, and the kinds of cars, and what people were wearing, restaurants. And so it helps us rebuild what this town looked like during specific time periods without actually going back in time,” Averette said.

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