This is a great idea Adrian! It's also nice to be able to scroll through photos without the need of a specific software, and electricity :) I feel that such process is like reflecting on a book, reading and resting alternatively while sitting in a comfortable armchair... Going back on the journey of taking those photos after such introspection must be indeed fruitful. Great advices, cheers !
Dude that is a really cool idea and it actually seems interesting to look at. The slight variations between shots mean they add to each other - like stereo but with images displaced in time as well as position? Neat.
Thanks! I agree, I think that it'll be very interesting to look at what I was shooting (at what we were shooting) back then, a few years down the road. To see that I spent quite a bit of time and maybe 20 shots to photograph a single tree, or something else. Will I be doing the same in 10 years?
Hi Adrian what a great way to keep those precious memories and those great moments, will be more special in years to come. I still put my photos in an Album and store them in an external Hard drive. Also i use Collage in photo editing software and i wouldn't mind trying Contact sheets you are so right when you say it tells a great story. Great to see your Bronica Film Camera, nice memories. Thanks for sharing this video.
I personally used Mixam, but there are plenty of others like Blurb. You could even print it at home. I think it cost me some $150 for both volumes, a bit steep but I still think it's worth it.
@@michaelnewmanphotography I just double checked and it was $145.76 for the two volumes (some 700 pages, US letter size), including shipping. The quality is pretty good, not outstanding but more than I needed for this kind of project.
I was hoping you could have used an european company to print. I use german Saal for my travel albums. They are very good but I'm looking for something cheaper. Great videos by the way.
Glad I stumbled upon this, I had been thinking about creating yearly books, however the idea of printing every photo and utilizing them in that regard is super interesting. Mine will be slightly a mess as I'm a sports photo amongst a bunch of other photographic mediums so there will be thousands per year haha!
Oops, for sure! Wildlife shooters, sport photographers, even wedding work... that might add up to more images than are manageable in physical form. Maybe limit it to more personal work? Or try a digital approach and keep it in a huge PDF file? But I understand having that volume makes things a bit more complicated :)
I have never seen one of your videos but this was recommended to me by the RU-vid algorithm. It’s an awesome concept. Where did you get your personal books printed?
Pretty cool idea and thanks for sharing, Adrian. I might pass on making contact sheets for tens of thousands of photos I've been taking since 2000. Could get a little spendy.
Haha, that's a lot of pictures, it'd be expensive for sure. I paid some $150 for these two volumes, that'll be $1,500 every 10 years or so. A good chunk of money but I'd really love to see 10 years worth of photography in several printed volumes. There's always the option of keeping it digital too, in PDF.
I sort of, kind of, do the same thing, except the printing part. I start with a folder with the year as the name, then Lightroom Classic creates and saves all the files I import into a folder titled that days date. At the End of each Month I create a folder (within Lightroom) with the Month as a name and move all the day folders with photos into that directory. I have folders for 2019 (when I started doing this) thru today. Basically the same as a contact sheet, except it's on my computers SSD. it also gets back up nightly to an external 8TB hard disk, in case of computer failure.
Nice! Yeah, a digital version is awesome too. I keep one myself because I'm not here full time and that way I can still look at it whenever I want, no matter where I am. Thanks for sharing your process!
I loved making contacts, but with digital, not so much! Not needed. Your books V1 and V2 are brilliant. I still would NOT do that! I've done similar.. I suggest printing small books of certain shoots! Great idea.
Thanks, Jason! Sure, this is a lot of work and not everyone will find it useful. And I agree about printing the images you made in an outing or shoot. Best thing is you can do both. Thanks again!
It's fascinating to me the synchronicity. I literally started doing a similar process at the beginning of this year. In my case, I'm not printing all the photos I take in a month but I still end up with a lot of single photos and sequences that help me understand what I'm doing. I'm also using these contact sheets as a way of making my archive more accessible for referencing in the future. Are you actually deleting a bunch of your digital files as you do this process??
That's awesome! Thanks for sharing your workflow :) Yes, I do delete many of the photographs almost right away, after putting them in the contact sheets. I still keep a lot, but I know that some are redundant or just bad photos that I will never use for anything.
I shot even more images last year (c.17k), which seems crazy (especially compared to film--I never kept track of how many I shot back then but certainly a lot fewer). My process is similar in that I try to capture how a scene makes me feel at the time (which may or may not involve multiple images). I do delete images in camera, however, if they clearly "won't work" and further cull when I upload to my PC prior to saving back-ups to external drives. Although storage is relatively cheap these days, why save "bad" images? I could try using small B&W "contact prints" as you describe (and it's always nice to have physical copies), but I prefer scrolling through full-screen JPGs in order to get a better idea of what to do with each image. My folder structure is by camera, year, then yyyymmdd so they're all arranged chronologically by camera. When I find one that looks potentially "printworthy" I copy the RAW file to a working folder where I generally start with DxO PhotoLab (and if necessary Nik and/or Topaz). I then save the TIFF(s) to named folders based on the nature of the images. I may also print at that point and in some cases I'll save it as a JPG to upload it to Instagram (although images don't look nearly as good there as they do in print!). My biggest challenge in photography is the curation/review process, and you're right to stress the importance of comparing past work to spot trends and chart progress. I agree that regardless of experience, we tend to improve the more we shoot, if we do so judiciously.
Thanks for sharing the process! I should have clarified that I also delete some photographs in camera, or later on the computer, but only the obviously bad ones. Like when I forget to put an ND filter for a long exposure (it happens more often than I'd want to admit) and I end up with a white frame. Or shots I take unintentionally, or extremely blurry shots. Or even when I take 3-4 pictures of exactly the same composition because it's too dark, or it's snowing, or whatever, and I want to make sure I get at least 1 good one. The point is to keep the ones that do add something to the story, that show the process you followed in the field. And yet, most of the images I have in my contact sheets are "bad", but I believe they teach me as much, if not more, about my photography than keeping just the very best. Agreed about the curation process. In a sense we not only curate our work but also what we see out there, ignoring what doesn't resonate and capturing what does. And absolutely about getting better the more we shoot. It is by far the best advice I've ever gotten and I've ever given. It's good practice, it builds momentum, and it keeps you shooting. The good images are just a matter of when, not if. Thanks for your sharing you process again!
@@aows current plans is to try to print family trips in to a book so its easily accessible to see at home. designing and arranging such a book is a little difficult. the way you showed it looks very really nice, will definitely try it your way.
@@JayGrapherTh absolutely, printing out photos from family trips is an awesome idea! The contact sheets are something extra, a place where to have all the pictures. But of course, I am aware this takes quite a bit work :)
Gracias Adrián por la idea. Dos preguntas donde imprimiste? Y el libro lo mandas a España? Me pareció entender que ahora lo estás enviando a algún país más.
Hola, Rosa! Utilicé una imprenta americana, Mixam, para las hojas de contacto, pero cualquier imprenta vale. Seguro que hay alguna en España que ofrece tal servicio, incluso alguna a nivel local. Al menos para mí, estas hojas de contacto son privadas y no me importaba mucho la calidad. Sobre el libro, sí lo envío a España! Por desgracia los gastos de envío son bastante caros y hay que tener en cuenta las más que posibles aduanas, pero en fin, mucha gente me pregunta así que he decidido hacerlo. Gracias por ver el vídeo!
Hey, Michael! So I used Mixam, but there are plenty of others out there like Blurb, or even a local printer in your town. Don't worry too much about the quality of the contact sheets :)
I used Mixam but any printer out there (like Blurb) would be just fine. Even a local printer that you might already have near you. This was just for me so I didn't care too much about it being "super high quality" or anything like that.
I don’t think an edited contact sheet has much value. It doesn’t show your process of taking pictures, since they originally are in color and not square format.
Well, it's not really "edited". I compose my photographs in square and black and white, but the raw files still show up as the original color, 3x2 sensor readout in Lightroom. I just take them back to what I saw in the field so they accurately reflect what I was trying to do.
