Contact sheets are very important in film photography
They give us a glimpse of all the photos that we took in a roll and we can decide if they are worth printing or not
but we don't need such a thing with digital photography, or do we?
Obviously, we can see what a digital photo looks like without having to print it
but I want to argue that contact sheets can be very useful for digital photographers
to share and to show their thought process or to learn from it
This is my case, I like to shoot a lot, I've talked about this before
I do work the scene and I like to take multiple shots of the same subject from different angles
or to vary just slightly the same composition
I almost always delete all the frames but the one that I like the most
in those cases, I like to make a contact sheet with all my shots and the one that I selected in the end
I like to keep them around and I like to look at the ones that I made from a couple years ago
to see how my workflow and my way of working in general in the fields has changed
Let's take a quick look at some of the contact sheets that I've made and
then I'm going to show you, really quick, how to make one in Photoshop
Alright, so this is the first one, this was a church in Austria
As you can see, I started focusing on the tower from different angles
Then I tried to capture the whole church from farther away, I try to include this tree
until I found the angle that I really liked the most, with the mountains in the background
I took a few shots with the church a little bit farther down, a little bit farther up
until I found the frame that I really liked, the one that I ended up choosing
as the the good one that is this one
Here, this is one of my favorite images to date, the one of the full moon in White Sands
here you can tell how I approach this, I started with the 16-70mm zoom lens, it wasn't long enough
I wanted the moon bigger than that so here's when I switched the lens to the 55-210mm
so I was able to make the moon bigger in the frames
as you can tell, I was playing with placing the moon lower and higher in the frame but I knew that I wanted
but I knew that I wanted
some dunes on the bottom and some space in between the moon and the top of the frame
I finally found these 2 dunes
I really liked the lines that they were creating here, but this one had a lot of details
the same with this one, or this one, this one was a lot, I tried to remove those details from the dunes
pointing the camera farther up
but there were not enough dunes there
I found the angle that I liked
This is pretty much the same image, the same composition but this is a slightly longer focal length
the moon is bigger than here and also the moon is a little bit farther up
I liked that other one day, this one that is marked here in red
this is a very recent photo of a foggy road
as you can see, I tried different things, different focal lengths, I tried to split the frame in different ways
here, the bridge is slightly bigger, it has more importance in the frame than that one that I ended up choosing
this one, it shows more of the curve of the road, so I like that one more
This is another image, another recent image, from a different road
as you can see, what I was playing with here was with the angle of the camera
The first one is a little bit lower, at eye level I believe, the other ones are higher up
I was holding the camera so it shows more of the line, it shows more of the road
This angle gives the road a little bit more of importance, it makes it a bigger
and also, what I was playing with here is if I wanted to show where this cliff ended or not, like here
or just show a little bit, I ended up choosing this one, kind of hinting the end of the cliff
another example: this Saguaro, in Arizona, this is the exact same composition, I didn't move the camera
It was a long exposure and I usually take a few long exposures, if I can
because as you can see here, the clouds look completely different, I mean not completely different
but they look different and I ended up liking the clouds here on the last frame the most
and the last one, this is another example of another situation where I take a lot of photos
of the same composition, because here the light was changing quite a lot,
the subject was completely dark here, and here it was completely lit by the light
I was lucky enough to get a mix of both: the foreground was bright
and the top of this needle was bright as well, while the rest of it was dark
I really liked the contrast in this photo
so by now you might be interested in making your own contact sheets, I'm gonna show you really quickly
how to do it in Photoshop
for that, you go to "File -> Automate -> Contact Sheet II"
here you just have to select a folder where you're gonna want to have all your photos,
the photos that you're gonna use for that contact sheet
just click open and just play with the settings that you have here
you can stop this video and take a look at the ones that I use
just click on OK and Photoshop will take care of the rest, you'll get the contact sheet in just a few seconds
you can use Lightroom for this as well, or you could use a word processor like Google Docs or something like that
it would be more a manual task, you'd have to drag the photos manually
but you can do it, and I think it's very useful to keep your images,
the scene, how you worked that scene and to show that thought process,
not only to other people but maybe to your future self
This is what I wanted to share today,
Thank you so much for watching again, and see you in the next one!