About the Site
Contact Sheet is a weblog that began in 2003 for the purpose of keeping a sketchpad of ideas
and comments. Here I write about some of my professional and personal interests: graphic & web design,
software, urban planning, architecture, media, film. Maintaining a personal weblog is a very self-important endeavor, but since any
writing looks so much more refined when “published” on a nice clean web page, it's what must be
done in order to keep me jotting things down on a regular basis.
Why Contact Sheet?
Playing off the photo reference, this type of daily writing
and image logging is unfiltered and in a very unrefined state. Blogs are just that—the raw materials
that others can examine, organize, reshape and ponder.
What is a Contact Sheet?
A contact sheet is a photographic term for a set of prints exposed on a single sheet of paper. A
photographer creates a contact sheet by laying strips of negatives on a sheet of emulsified photo paper and
exposing it to light in a darkroom. This produces positive images the same physical size as the negatives.
Approximately 30-36 images of 35mm film can fit on a single 8" × 10" contact sheet. Since looking at
processed negatives can be a chore, the contact sheet can be stored with the negatives and used to
reference specific photos quickly.
et cetera
