Magnum Contact Sheets

A few days ago thanks to, of all things, an article on the Apple News app—it never ceases to amaze me how much garbage I find there, but I still navigate to it (I don’t know why)—I discovered a book entitled Magnum Contact Sheets.

In a roundabout way, I ended up also discovering that the book was available in its entirety for checkout on archive.org, a virtual online library. Paging through it on my iPad, I was struck and somehow comforted by how many stinker images photographers often captured on the roll of film that contained the one good keeper image that was the center of discussion for each contact sheet. Many of those keeper images were iconic ones in the history of photography.

I ended up buying a copy of the book. It’s nice to have access to some books online, but sometimes it’s worth the expense that it takes to get the actual physical paper in my hands.

Perusing through the book, I began thinking about how I could create my own contact sheets both for my digital and film photography. After a bit more contemplation, I remembered that the Windows print dialog for images includes an option to print a contact sheet for a collection of image files. I poked around Canon’s Digital Photo Professional, which I use to edit all my raw image files and to generate JPEGs, and I discovered that it, too, has a feature for printing contact sheets with a much more robust set of options than what the Windows photo print dialog offers.

What a great way to capture a complete chronological record of images I may take in a given session. I may not want images that are clearly not keepers to consume significant disk space, but I’d like to maintain a record of what I shot from end to end, if anything, to preserve the train of thought I had when I was working a subject.

When I went out and about today, a welcomingly wet and cloudy day considering that we’ve been dealing with wildfire smoke for the past few weeks, I shot photos on my walk with the intent to save everything I shot on a digital contact sheet. I ended up saving only a handful of images from that photo shoot, and I rated an even smaller number as being worthy of any regard. But I now have an end-to-end record of my walk and an indication of how many images I often shoot in order to get a handful of keeper images.