Why I Built ContactSheet.ai

I bought my first camera in 2002. A 35mm film Canon SLR, nothing fancy. I had no idea what I was doing with it, and for a long time that was fine. Photography was something I did on and off — holidays, walks, occasional bursts of ambition that would fade after a few weeks. Nothing systematic. Nothing serious.

That changed last year.

The ambition arrives

I started watching photography seriously. Hours of tutorials on YouTube — some skillfully made, some not so much. Interviews with photographers I admired. Exhibitions. Photobooks. The kind of deep reading you do when something has properly caught your attention and you want to understand it rather than just consume it.

It was energising. Each thing I watched or read gave me a new idea about what a photograph could be, a new way of seeing that I wanted to try. The ambition was real.

Then I picked up the camera and went to the street.

And I realised, immediately, how wide the gap was.

The gap

It was not a gap in vision. I could see what I wanted to make. I would be standing somewhere with interesting light, a scene that felt alive, a moment forming in front of me, and I knew — roughly, at least — what kind of photograph was possible there.

The problem was mechanics.

While I was thinking about whether the exposure was right, the moment passed. While I was deciding whether to reframe, the light shifted. The photograph I made was not the photograph I saw. Again and again, what was in my head and what was on the card were different things, and I did not always understand why.

The more time I spent making photographs, the more I understood that learning to see and learning to operate the camera were two separate problems — and that you cannot really do the first until the second becomes automatic.

What I wished for

I found myself thinking about photographers I had read about, watched interviews with, spent time studying.

I wished I could have roamed the streets of New York with Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand in the 1960s and 1970s, watching how they worked, learning to see through watching them see. I would have treasured the opportunity to shadow Ernst Haas and Saul Leiter and experience colour the way they did — not as a technical problem but as a way of feeling through a scene. I thought about what it would mean to just tag along on a single one of Martin Parr's trips to the beach.

These are fantasies, obviously. But they point at something real: the thing that most photographers are missing is not information. There is more information about photography available than anyone could absorb in a lifetime. What is missing is someone looking at your specific photographs and telling you, honestly, what they see.

The realisation

At some point I understood that before I could be free to learn to see — really learn, in the way those photographers knew how to see — I had to get the mechanics so automatic that they stopped taking up space in my head.

Composition. Light. The relationship between what is sharp and what is soft. How to frame instinctively. When to wait and when to press. These things needed to become habits rather than decisions. When they are habits, attention is free. When they are still decisions, attention is occupied and the moment is gone.

This is how ContactSheet.ai came to mind.

Not as a product, initially. As a tool I wanted for myself — an honest companion I could share frames with, frames I felt could be better but did not know why, and get a clear explanation of what was working and what was standing in the way. Honest feedback. Sometimes more honest than comfortable.

Sharing it

Once I had something working, the decision to share it was straightforward.

Photography is not a competitive pursuit for most of the people who do it seriously. There is no reason to keep useful tools to yourself. If something helps you make better photographs, it will probably help other photographers too.

So I opened it up.

ContactSheet.ai is free to use — five photographs a month, forever. That is a solemn promise: as long as this project is alive, that will not change. It is my gift to anyone on the same path I am on, the path from making photographs that almost work to making photographs that say what you intended them to say.

If one day you get to the point where you are arranging exhibitions and leading photo walks and I get to come along — even better.

What it does and does not do

ContactSheet.ai analyses the mechanics of your photographs: composition, lighting, timing, subject relationship. It tells you what it observes — what is working, what is not, and what to carry forward to the next photograph.

It does not teach you to see. It cannot. Seeing is yours — it comes from your life and your attention and the specific way you notice things. No AI will ever have that, and it would be a strange ambition to try to give it one.

What it can do is get out of the way. Remove the mechanical obstacles that stand between what you see and what the photograph shows. Make the mechanics less of a problem so that the seeing can be more of an opportunity.

That is all it is trying to do.