Remember these? Sometimes I forget just how different the process of photography was when I was shooting on film. I subscribe to the French photography magazine Réponses Photo that (amongst many other things) has a regular feature each month where they ask a well known photographer to comment upon one of their contact sheets from a memorable shoot, for me it's always fascinating to see the process and narrative to the images which led up to the final 'keeper' image from the 36 exposures.
I had a rummage through my archive and found a contact sheet of my own that produced one of my favourite images. Having a look over the sheet made me realise that during this period I was very economical with my shooting. Perhaps shooting digitally with huge capacity memory cards has led me to become a bit more looser with my shooting than I was back then.
Shooting digitally also means that the non selected images from a shoot get immediately forgotten after the initial yes/no edit, where as with film and the contact sheet there is a permanent record of every exposure. I still supply contact sheets to clients but these are of my selected images from the shoot with all post production applied. One U.S photographer Chase Jarvis decided to share all his images, every single exposure, from five days of shooting and created a slideshow of them which can be seen here, this I guess being the closest thing to a 'digital contact sheet'. I wonder how many rolls of film that would have amounted to? Selected images from my contact sheet can be seen below and more of my black and white images shot on film can be seen on my main website here.
Click on contact sheet above to see much larger. Background details to shoot: Images taken at Speakers Corner, early 2000. Images taken with Pentax ME Super with 50mm prime lens. Shot on Ilford HP5 400 asa film stock and negatives developed with Agfa Rodinal developer, images printed on Ilford Multigrade resin coated paper
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