▶ VIDEO — youtube-nocookie.com/embed/W_Sf6uMrxeg
▶ VIDEO — youtu.be/W_Sf6uMrxeg
How to Make a Contact Sheet and Sequence Your Street Photos
I hate the term. I think it’s a stupid term, street photography.
What’s poppin’, people? It’s Dante.
Welcome to today’s video, where I’m going to share with you a tool I built to help you sequence your photographs at home. So let’s jump straight to the desktop and check out my website.
Flux Studio
Here we are at flux.photography. This is where you can access Flux Studio and create your own zines at home. You can make landscape, magazine, saddle-stitch, or mini zines. You can also use a generator that automatically sequences everything and lays it out for printing.
There’s a Contact Sheet Studio, and now there’s a new Freeform Studio that I just built.
Sequencing photographs in Freeform
If you click on Freeform, you’ll be prompted to import some photographs. Drag and drop them in, and they’ll appear in a photo bank on the left-hand side. I can click Add All to the Table and then minimize the photo bank to give myself more room to see the photographs.
The photographs start out on a grid. Once you click an image and drag it around, you can start to play with sequencing. Click and drag over two images to select them and make a pair, or grab a few photographs and make a group.
You can make each photograph a small, medium, or large thumbnail. Press Command+A to select all the thumbnails, or zoom in to get a little closer to your sequence.
With Arrange, you can go back to the grid or lay the photographs out in a row, a column, or a contact sheet. With Sort, you can put the work in chronological order, restore the original order, or shuffle the photographs.
I find Random Pairs extremely useful. It’s a fun way to play with your photographs and see what happens when two images get put together at random. There’s also a pen tool, an arrow tool, and a text tool. You can go back to the select tool whenever you want to remove something you’ve added.
Printing your Freeform layout
I’m going to restore the original order and show you how I make a contact sheet I can print out. Arrange the images however you like on the canvas, then click Export Sheet and choose Canvas Sheet. You can export it as a PDF or a PNG, and it’ll keep the layout you made on the canvas so you can print it out at home.
You can also choose Sequence Sheet to export the photographs in sequence in a clean grid.
Once you have your sequence locked in, click Studio and choose the format of the zine you’d like to produce. The photographs will appear there, ready for you to play with. Everything is connected through Flux Studio. For me, it’s a much simpler way to engage with the work physically than tinkering with Lightroom and Photoshop.
Making a contact sheet
In Contact Sheet Studio, you can drag and drop your photographs, select the classic contact sheet, and choose whether you want 6, 12, or 36 photographs on a single sheet. Pick US Letter or A4 and click Make Contact Sheet.
You’ll get a file in your downloads with the photographs laid out on the sheet. Each photo has Pick, Maybe, and Out options so you can mark up the work.
You can print out the sheet, cut everything out as small thumbnails, and paste them on your wall or lay them out on your floor.
That’s essentially a physical version of the Freeform application I built.
Both tools are live at flux.photography. Feel free to use them to help with your sequencing, then step into Flux Studio and make a zine. We have a public gallery for submissions, and I can print out the work and review it here on the YouTube channel. I’m looking forward to seeing what you make.
A street photography game set in Philadelphia
One last thing I thought would be fun. I made a 16-bit retro-style street photography game set in Philadelphia. There are a couple of levels based on different spots around the city. For this video, I’ll click on City Hall.
Use the arrow keys to move and the space bar to take photographs of people as they come toward you. You get points for making photos. There are cars and a little Uber Eats robot you have to avoid, and you can collect a jug of raw milk, which I’m drinking right now. You can regain your health by basking in the glory of the sun.
There’s a pull-up bar, too. I love doing pull-ups on the street, so I added that as a little Easter egg.
If you press the space bar at one of the tripods, you’ll get a minigame. Here, I’m prompted to photograph somebody crossing in front of a bus. So you wait, frame, and click that shutter.
When you complete the level, you can download a randomly generated Flux mini zine made with my actual photographs. There’s a frame I made outside City Hall and a few other photos from around Philadelphia. You can print the zine at home, download a contact sheet of the photographs you made in the game, and move on to the Italian Market.
You can play it on your phone or your computer. There’s some music you can turn on, too.
Make something physical
I’m looking to empower other photographers with these tools. Feel free to use them, share them with photographers you know, and play with sequencing your work. Make a zine and share it with me and the community.
If you’d like to dive into more, you can join the public Discord and share your work and your zines there. I also have a Substack you can follow to stay in touch. Otherwise, check out the website, subscribe on YouTube, and I’ll see you soon.
Peace.
DANTE SISOFO · · dantesisofo.com/how-to-make-a-contact-sheet-and-sequence-your-street-photos/
