Last Christmas I was very lucky to receive the Magnum Contact Sheets book.
This mammoth book is big, heavy, expensive but above all, inspiring. To see how these photography greats worked is fascinating.
A full review of Magnum Contact Sheets will appear soon.
After reading the book, i started thinking about my contact sheets, and lack of.
When I started my photography education back in 1998 (showing my age a bit there) we were encouraged to create contact sheets in the dark room, then lean over them with a loupe and circle the best ones with a marker pen.
That was a long time ago, and sadly they are all lost.
Contact sheets are a great way to analyse how your work, so i decided to make some with my flatbed scanner.
I scanned a roll of B&W AGFA APX100 that I shot at Canary Wharf a few months ago with the Canon Canonet QL19 Giii.
I also dug out some 120 colour slides from the archives (Fuji Provia 100F if I remember correctly), I chose a film I shot in my home town in 2004 with a Bronica ETRSI I borrowed from a college friend.
Not as good as you’d get from real darkroom contact sheets, but for a quick digital scan i’m quite pleased with them. I shall try to produce and upload contact sheets for all my street photography and camera review posts from now on.
After a few trials runs with different scanner settings I came up with these:
(not the actual camera I used, but looked exactly the same. This one is for sale, and quite cheap too: http://www.teddingtonphotographic.com/itemForSale.php?type=MEDIUMFORMAT&items=BRONICA&stockno=892664)
Ah, I’ve been wanting that Magnum contact sheet book. There was even a publication of Robert Frank’s contact sheets which I think would be really informative. I should make more contact sheets of my work, I’ve sadly fallen out of habit.
Its a great book, I highly recommend it.
Making contact sheets will also save me time, I used to preview scan every image! now i can just scan the ones i want.
I love the look of the contact sheets. I might start doing that on some of my blog posts…