TheOlympian

The Ladder

Seven gates. Every one a Thursday. Hit them and everything downstream takes care of itself. Miss one and it does not stay a small problem for long.

These dates are ours, and they are the only ones you need. Behind them is a printing plant that runs a schedule for a thousand schools and does not care that our photographer got mono. That is why these do not move. Not because I am rigid about it, but because the thing standing behind them is not a person you can talk to.

All seven weigh the same. There is no small gate, no practice gate, and no gate where a missing page quietly gets absorbed. A page that is not in on Thursday is a hole, and a hole does not fill itself in later.

The Pipeline

Five steps, in order, no shortcuts. Shoot RAW. Cull. Edit in Lightroom Classic. Export to the preset. Upload to your labeled folder. Then it goes into Walsworth.

RAW: what it is and why it is enormous

Your sensor is a grid of about 24 million buckets that each catch light and report one number. That number is the only thing the camera actually knows. The color, the contrast, the punchy look on the back screen: all decisions somebody made afterward.

A JPEG is the camera making all of those decisions for you and then throwing away the evidence. It picks a white balance and bakes it in. It picks contrast and sharpening and bakes those in. Then it crushes each color channel from 16,384 brightness levels down to 256 and deletes detail it has decided you will not miss. It is usually right. It is also permanent.

RAW keeps all 16,384. That is the whole thing. It is why a gym shot at ISO 6400 that looks like a hostage video can come back, and why a face lit orange by whatever bulbs the district installed in 1987 can be white again in about four seconds.

And yes, it is huge. Three to five times a JPEG, every frame, because you are storing 24 million full readings instead of a picture somebody already finished. One football game on burst is twenty gigabytes. Bring the big card. Bring two.

Turn it on before you leave the room

• Sony A7 IV
  MENU → Shooting → Image Quality → Image Quality Settings → File Format → RAW
• Sony A6700
  MENU → Shooting → Image Quality/Rec → File Format → RAW
• Sony A7 III
  MENU → Camera Settings1 → File Format → RAW
• Nikon Z5
  i Menu → Still Images → Image quality → NEF (RAW)
• Canon Rebel T5
  MENU → red camera tab → Image quality → RAW
• Then prove it
  Take one frame, hit playback, confirm the card is writing .ARW, .NEF or .CR2. Ten seconds now, or a whole game you cannot use later

RAW+JPEG exists and you do not need it. It doubles your card usage to give you a file you were going to replace anyway.

Getting it off the card

1. Grab an SD card reader from the trash can on the two-monitor desk by the camera lockers. Card into reader, reader into the PC.
2. Make a folder on the desktop with your name on it. Gianna’s Yearbook Photos.
3. Inside it, the event folder: EVENT NAME_YOUR NAME_DATE. So JV_GIRLS_VOLLEYBALL_Gianna C_9.7.2025. Inside that, two folders: originals and selects.
4. Drag everything off the card into originals. Everything, including the blurry ones. You do not get to decide what is useless at 4pm on a Friday.
5. Go through originals in the file browser and pick the keepers. Twenty from a game is plenty, forty is generous, all 800 is not a selection.
6. Open Lightroom Classic, import the keepers with ADD (never Copy, never Move), fix exposure, white balance and crop, then export through the class preset into selects.
7. Go to the shared Drive, signed in with your CCUSD email. The link is pinned in #yb-wiki. Make a folder with the exact same name as step 3 and upload both folders.
8. Count them. Actually count them. Then set sharing: selects editable, originals view-only. Originals are the only copy of a thing that happened once.
9. Post in PHOTO DRIVE LINKS exactly like this: JV_GIRLS_VOLLEYBALL_Gianna C_9.7.2025 | link. Same string as your folders, so it is searchable.
10. Sports go on the sports sheet too. Shot for a specific spread? Send it straight to whoever owns that spread.
11. Return the reader to a gear lead. They confirm the upload landed, then they wipe the card. Nobody wipes their own card. Not because we do not trust you. Because the one time it goes wrong, it goes wrong forever.

A photo nobody can find did not happen. A photo nobody backed up never existed.

The Book

The numbers are not suggestions. A printer will not fix your bleed for you, and there is no round two.

• Trim size
  8.5 × 11 in · standard
• Bleed
  0.125 in past trim on any edge the art runs off
• Safe margin
  0.125 in minimum from the page edge for anything that must not get cut
• Gutter allowance
  0.375 in on the spine edge. Bigger than the bleed and the margin combined. This is where faces go to die
• Color
  CMYK or Pantone. Never RGB. Rich black is 50C 40M 40Y 100K, total ink under 300%. Never use the Registration swatch
• Images
  300 dpi at final printed size. Line art 800 dpi
• Type
  TrueType or OpenType only, embedded. 12 pt minimum on four-color text
• Formats
  TIFF, EPS, PDF, JPEG

How big does the photo need to be

• Full page, bleeding
  2625 × 3375 px
• Full page
  2550 × 3300 px
• Half page
  2550 × 1650 px
• Quarter page
  1275 × 1650 px
• Eighth page · small ads
  1275 × 825 px

Every camera in that cabinet clears the biggest of those about four times over. Which means the camera is never the problem.

Pixels, DPI, and why your photo printed like garbage

Your photo has exactly one hard number: how many pixels it is. A shot off the A7 III is 6000 by 4000. That is the entire amount of information that exists, and nothing you do later adds any.

DPI is not a property of your file. It is an instruction about how big to print it. Same photo printed small packs those pixels tight and looks sharp. Printed huge it spreads them out and looks like a screenshot of a screenshot. The pixels never changed. The inches did.

The math is division and it is the only math on this page: pixels ÷ inches = the number that matters. 3000 pixels across a 10 inch page is 300. Across 20 inches it is 150. One file, two outcomes, no magic.

So here is the thing that will save you: opening a small image and typing 300 into the DPI box does absolutely nothing. It cannot add pixels. It just changes a note attached to the file, and the note is not the file. If the software offers to “resample” while it does it, that is worse, because now it is inventing pixels by guessing what was between the ones you had.

Formats: what survives, what does not

• RAW · ARW NEF CR2
  Lossless. What the camera captures. Not an image yet, and not something Walsworth takes
• TIFF
  Lossless, transparent, enormous. Print masters
• PNG
  Lossless and holds transparency. Logos, cutouts, anything with a see-through background
• JPEG
  Lossy, no transparency. Final photos, exported once, at the end
• HEIC / WebP
  What iPhones and websites hand you. Convert before it causes a scene
• SVG / AI / EPS
  Vector. Math, not pixels. Sharp at any size forever. Logos and type only

JPEG forgets a little every time you save. That is the deal, and it is a good deal once. The problem is it does it again on every save. Open, tweak, save, five times over, and you are looking at soup with no way back. So: edit from the RAW, export to JPEG once, at the end. The JPEG is the printout. You do not edit the printout.

JPEG cannot hold a transparent background. Ever. Cut a mascot out, spend twenty minutes on the edges, export as JPEG, and your transparency becomes a white box that you will then place on a colored page. Cut it out, save as PNG. That is the whole rule.

RGB and CMYK, briefly. Screens make color with light and can hit colors that ink physically cannot. Print uses four inks. So the neon blue that looked incredible on the monitor comes back slightly sad and dusty, and nobody did anything wrong. Know it going in, do not discover it in March.

A photo does not get sharper because you needed it to.

This has to be signed

Five minutes, with a parent or guardian, once.

One short form. It confirms you have both read this syllabus and the CRED rubric, and that you understand the two rules on this site that carry automatic penalties.

Sign the acknowledgment ↗

Sign in with your CCHS email, pick Yearbook Design when it asks which course, and do it sitting next to a parent or guardian. Both of you are signing. It takes about five minutes and it is the same form for every CTE class here, so if you are in Graphic Design or Game Dev too, you only fill it out once per course.

Beat Sheets

Four to six countable things, with a number attached, printed where everyone can see them. Nobody gets to argue about what their job was, because it is a list.

Running a department

If you hold a chair, this is the job, and it is smaller than it sounds. One question a day, fifteen minutes a week, four things a month.

Toolkit

This page is the reference now. Discord is for things that stream, this is for things that stay.

Camera School →

Shutter, aperture, ISO, focus, lenses, and settings recipes for the four situations that cover almost everything: the gym, the stage, midday sun and the classroom.

The Month

Same shape as Graphic Design, on purpose, so the two rooms run on one clock. Draft first, two signatures second, spread third. Always that order.

Draft, approved, then spread

Spreads are not due every week. Drafts are.

A draft is cheap and a finished spread is not. Rebuilding a page you already designed costs you a weekend. Redrawing a thumbnail costs you ten minutes, which is the entire reason we do it in that order.

A normal week, if you are not a chair

The workshops

The Grade

Three buckets, three criteria, one check-in a month. If you can hold that in your head you can predict your grade at any moment, which is the whole point.

Every deliverable, three criteria

• 1
  On time. Hit the gate. Thursday, not Friday, not “basically Thursday.”
• 2
  Correct. Names spelled right, facts right, specs hit. This is the one that gets printed.
• 3
  Complete. Copy, captions, photos, folio, all present. Nothing with “I’ll add it later” in it.

Each one scores 1 to 5, on the same scale as Graphic Design. 5 ships, a printer would take it and run. 4 is one round of notes away. 3 meets the brief. 2 attempted. 1 barely engaged. 0 missing.

Read the full CRED rubric →

Shooting for the feed

Content is the only department whose work the whole school sees the same week it is made. That is the fun part and the dangerous part.

• Reels / TikTok / Stories
  1080 × 1920 · 9:16 vertical
• Feed post
  1080 × 1350 vertical, or 1080 × 1080 square. Vertical wins
• Safe zone
  820 × 1220 in the middle. Roughly 250 px off the top, 450 off the bottom, 200 off the right
• Subtitles
  Always. Most people watch with the sound off, and it is the cheapest accessibility win we have

The apps put their own furniture on top of your video: your username up top, the caption and sound and follow button across the bottom, the like-comment-share stack down the right. Anything under that furniture is gone. Faces, text and logos live inside the safe zone or they do not exist. Grab the overlay from the toolkit, build inside it, delete the layer before export, then check it on an actual phone, because these apps move their buttons whenever they feel like it.

Cut it in Resolve

DaVinci Resolve is the editor. It is free, it is what actual post houses cut on, and its color tools are the entire difference between video that looks like a school made it and video that does not. It is on the machines in this room and it runs fine on them.

Give it one real afternoon on something that is not due tomorrow. The first hour is not friendly and every hour after it is, and you will be using it long after this class.

The caption is not decoration. The first line is the entire game, because that is all anyone reads before deciding. Give people something to actually read after it: a fact, a name, a joke, a reason to care. Ask something worth answering, because a comment is worth more than a like. Hashtag piles do nothing. A sentence somebody screenshots does everything.

Who is giving the notes: I founded and ran the global content and community team at Razer, then ran US programming for Red Bull Gaming. I have opinions about your caption and they are load-bearing.

The 4th Period Pass

You can walk this campus with a camera during 4th period. Almost nobody in this building can do that. Take advantage of your privilege.

This is not a perk we tacked on. It is how a third of the book gets photographed. Games and rallies happen after school. Classes in session happen exactly once, during the day, and this is the only window where a student with a camera is allowed into somebody’s Chem lab. Academics, electives, AVPA and CTE all live or die here.

So the period is zoned, not negotiated. Design is in, Outreach is out, Content splits. Two exceptions and they are absolute: workshop week and gate week, everybody is in the room.

How this works

Three departments, three leadership structures, and one sentence that keeps them straight: club officers run the club, chairs run the book, reps run the wire.

Cover Everyone

You will photograph your friends. Everybody does. That is not a character flaw, it is proximity: the people who are near you, who answer, who say yes, end up in the book.

The job is not to pretend you are above that. The job is to notice you are doing it and walk somewhere else.

We have fixed this twice. Both times we fixed the group and not the mechanism, and both times a different group quietly took over the next year. Different kids, same physics. So this year it is a mechanism.

The counts live behind our class login, never on this page, because a public list of who appears how many times is exactly the document that should not exist.

Dojo-kun

He reads your daily post, looks at your screenshot, and hands you a number out of 4 with one sentence explaining why. Same day, every day.

4 out of 4 is full credit and it should feel like a win, not a ceiling you clawed your way to. 5 exists, it is extra credit, and it is rare on purpose: it wants real reasoning, not more words. No screenshot, no credit. It feeds your CRED.

Whose book this is

You run it. I sign it off.

This room is student run and I mean it literally. You pick the theme, you decide what goes in, you assign your own people, you run your own meetings, and your names are on the finished thing. That is the actual arrangement, not a nice gesture, and it only works if you make real decisions and then live with them.

I am the editor. I steer the direction once we land on a theme, I hold the line on it when it starts drifting in February, and I am the last set of eyes before three hundred pages become permanent. On the calls that define what this book is, and on anything that cannot be un-printed, I have the final word. Everywhere else, you do, and I would rather argue with you about it than decide it for you.

In practice that authority lives in one place: every draft needs my signature and your department head’s before it gets built. That is deliberate. A final say that only shows up at the end is a veto, and a veto lands after you have already done the work. Signing at the draft stage is steering, which costs you ten minutes instead of a weekend and is the only version of this that respects your time.

The cover is mine by default and yours the moment you take it. I usually design it, because I can, and because somebody has to. That is the only reason. Show me you can carry it and it is yours, and I will happily spend that week doing literally anything else.

And if I am doing this right, I disappear

Not because I stopped caring. Because a room that needs me standing in it every day is a room I am running, and I already told you this one is yours. The measure of whether any of this worked is how little you needed me by March.

So treat me like a summon. You call me for:

• Breaking a gate. Something is stuck and it needs somebody with actual authority to move it.
• Fixing what broke. Gear, software, a file that will not open, a page the plant rejected.
• Issues. Between people, with a teacher, with a photo somebody is unhappy about. These get worse quietly and cheaper early.
• Routing. To admin, to ASB, to a coach, to the front office, to our Walsworth rep. Half of this job is knowing who actually has the answer, and I already know.
• Money. Anything that costs anything is mine. Do not go buy it yourself and hand me a receipt.

Everything else is you. And the year I walk into a Wednesday meeting and find out you already handled all five without me is the year this actually worked.

Students own the what and the how. Nobody owns the when. The gates, the specs, the privacy rules and the plant calendar are fixed and external, and they are fixed precisely so everything inside them can be yours. The structure holds the edges so you can run the middle.

Before you do anything else

You got to the bottom. Now go do the five minute thing.

One short form, with a parent or guardian, confirming you have both read this page and the CRED rubric. Until it is in, 20% of your grade cannot be entered. Not lowered. Not entered.

Sign the acknowledgment ↗

CCHS email, pick Yearbook Design I or II, sit next to a parent. Somebody forgets every year and it is always the person reading this sentence.

The Archive

OLYMPIAN did not start with us. There is a 1962 edition sitting in this building, and a 1988, and a 2019, made by people who sat in these chairs and worried about the same deadlines.

Every year the staff picks a new name and a new look, and every year it is still the Olympian. That is the part worth understanding: you are not making a book, you are taking a turn.