Contact Sheets

Contact sheets are the easiest and fastest way to catalogue the film you shoot. Traditionally this is done in a dark room where you make a photographic print from your roll of film. As my workflow for film images is largely based around rolls/sheets being developed, cut & sleeved and then scanned, my contact sheets are in fact digital ones. It’s how I catalogue all of my film based images (both digitally stored and hard copy archived). The image above is a typical digital contact sheet. Notice the lettering at the bottom? This is also how I name and file everything; by format, type and roll number. So in this instance the 135 stands for 35mm film, the V100 stands for Velvia 100 and the R10 suggests this is the tenth roll I have taken. Similarly, I extend this naming convention to each scanned file. For example, 135V100R10F003 would be the third image of that roll. Fortunately Adobe Photoshop CS2 has an excellent inbuilt automated contact sheet creator that makes this process very easy.


Digital contact sheet