Contact Sheet. Catherine Ursillo by Al Gruen.

Contact Sheet by Al Gruen is an interesting and worthwhile book. It is about picking your best photos from a contact sheet. (And it also works for picking your best digital images.)  In the darkroom you can lay all of your negatives from one roll of film on top of a sheet of photographic paper. You expose the paper and develop it and you have miniature photos of all your negatives on one piece of paper. It is called a contact sheet. An example is the image above. You can look at the little photos with a photographer’s loupe (a kind of magnifying glass) and pick your best images to make enlargements.

This book is all about how you decide which are your best images. That process is important whether we are talking about film or digital images.

The image at the top of this article is a contact sheet of photos of Catherine Ursillo, a professional photographer. The photos were created by Al Gruen, the book’s author. You can see the frame numbers in white under the photos.

Frame 11A.

Gruen asked Ursillo to pick the best frame. She picked frame 11A which you can see in the image immediately above.

Frame 5A.

Gruen picked frame 5A which you can see in this photo.  In the contact sheet it is in the top row, last image on the right. Note the subtle difference between frame 4A and 5A. To my eye, 5A is clearly better than 4A.

Tastes vary, even among talented photographers. I happen to agree with Ursillo. I prefer frame 11A. I showed both photos to my wife Melissa without saying who liked which frame best. Melissa picked frame 5A, like Gruen.

As a side note, despite the chopped off fingers as printed in the photo in the book (frame 11A), I was taught never to chop off people’s fingers. I was taught to show all of the hand or crop above the wrist. In the whole frame in the contact sheet (top image, row 4, last photo on the right) you can see Gruen included her whole hand in the frame.

Despite differences in taste, some photos are clearly better than others. This book is all about helping you figure out which of your photos are your best photos. I recommend reading this book. If your library doesn’t have it they can get it for you on inter-library loan.