Contact sheets

Making a contact sheet for a website.
Over the years I have taken a great many photographs.  Many of them are of the magnificent creatures we share the Earth with, but there are a lot of photos of landscapes and some interesting brick-a-brack that I happen to find appealing.  I keep my photos in various collections so that I can easily peruse them when looking for something.  I have almost 9,000 images I keep for teaching purposes, many of them I use when putting a blog together.  I have another 2,000 large images, mostly as TIFFs, that I can produce 16x20s of if the need should arise.  Then I have a collection of 8x10s.

I have been working on my website (www.ericspix.com) lately in an attempt to update it and make it more flexible for viewing on the myriad of devices in use by the populace.  A friend of mine (thank you Lincoln) helped me with the coding so that now I can program in HTML myself without getting too lost.  I consider myself a novice as I can't go much beyond text, links, and images, but that is all I am really concerned about. 

I use Adobe Photoshop CC as my go-to program for editing my images.  Although Lightroom does the trick for much of what I do CC offers options that I frequently use in producing graphics for the books and educational sheets I produce.  One of the neat features is the ability to make contact sheets.

In the darkroom, I used to make contact sheets by placing strips of negatives on an unexposed sheet of photo paper.  Covering it with glass and exposing the layers with light from an enlarger, the developer would unveil a contact sheet with each frame clearly discernable.  You could usually get five rows of a strip of six images on a single 8x10 sheet.

The contact sheets I made on my computer took relatively little time, about a minute for each sheet.  I used my collection of 8x10s previously mentioned as the stock and ended up with 4 sheets; 120 images in all.  I have many more, but these are scenes that I have taken the time to prepare for the specific purpose of making 8x10s.  I have prints of each, framed in mattes, and wrapped in cellophane for sale when I do craft shows, usually around Christmas.

I will be presenting these contact sheets in my gallery, viewable at www.ericspix.com/gallery.  At this second it is not running, but it should be up later today or tomorrow at the latest.  Appreciate the fact that these represent a lifetime of work and are a graphical representation of what drives me.  It is kind of like bearing my soul.  If anyone is interested in a print, 8x10 or larger, follow the directions about obtaining an image.

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com   Eric Svendsen

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