Artistic and Practical Considerations
Photographers praise the beautiful intermediate gray or color gradation that results from making prints this way. Each print is necessarily the same size as the corresponding image on the negative. This makes contact prints from large-format negatives, especially 5×7 inch and larger, most usable for fine-art work. Smaller contact prints, from films and formats such as 135 film cassettes, 35 mm (24×36 mm images), and 120/220 roll film (6 cm), are useful for evaluation of exposure, composition, and subject.
It is cheaper and easier to avoid making conventional prints of all the exposures with an enlarger; the photographer prints only the best negatives. Selection is usually made using a loupe — a special magnifying glass with a transparent base — to examine the tiny prints, still aligned as they are on the negative strips. Negatives themselves can be examined with a loupe, but blacks and whites are the reverse of what is seen through the view finder (hence: a negative), which makes it slightly more difficult to interpret the images. Contact sheets can easily be stored in files in the dark, along with the negatives. A stack of conventional prints is much thicker.
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“The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)