Contact Sheets and the Discipline of Constraints

Constraints are useful when they remove low-value decisions. For personal documentary projects, I keep the technical setup narrow: one camera body, one lens, one color profile target in post.

This is less about purity and more about continuity. When the visual language is consistent, the viewer spends less energy parsing style shifts and more energy reading the subject.

Contact sheet review

After each shoot day, I review in strips, not individual favorites. Contact context reveals intent drift quickly: where framing became repetitive, where pacing dropped, where I started chasing novelty.

Constraint examples that help

• Single focal length for the whole session
• Hard cap on total selects per shoot
• No color split-toning on first edit pass

If a frame still works under those rules, it tends to stay strong when the project grows.