I suppose that only a committed photographer working exclusively with digital but came of photo age when film reigned can become nostalgic for the contact sheet. In the days when photography meant putting film in a camera, shooting and then developing film and hanging it up to dry and then becoming frustrated with all the dust on the negatives, the contact sheet was the first step in reviewing your images. Because you couldn’t throw away frames on the contact sheet you didn’t like the contact sheet became a de facto diary of your process of shooting. It documents what catches your eye, how many images of a scene, person, object you take, how you move through a day or a week (or a month if you are really lazy).
That is not the case with digital, instead of a collection of contact sheets and negatives I have a hard drive of digital files arranged in folders by subject and each batch has had a preliminary edit. It would be very hard to reconstruct what catches my eye or how I move through the world with a camera or even what I shoot from day to day. So I thought I would do an experiment. I shot with my Fuji X E-3 (I love these cameras) as if it contained only a roll of 36 exposure film and then created a contact sheet in Photoshop.
It’s kind of interesting. It starts with a random image taken through a train window and then several images of dominoes, which was the main activity after the Thanksgiving dinner at my parent’s house. It then proceeds to image’s of my son as we went to see John Leguizamo’s Broadway show, Latin History For Morons. Some images of shadows cast on a moving train, subway images, a couple of pictures of tulips on my dining room table and finally some images from a walk along Riverside Drive in NYC. An interesting diary of about a week in my life.
Force Of Seeing 