Matt's Exposure Record Book

I really like John Shaw's photo books and have admired with awe some aspects of his photography, particularly, the fact that he has all the eposures noted! How's he do that?! Does he write them all down or just make them up? It would be easy enough, I suppose, to do the latter: "Let's see, it was sunny out, so we'll tell 'em that was 1/125th at f/16...no, wait, I'll yank their chains and tell 'em it was 1/8000th at f/2.0, see if anyone notices!"

Me, I'm terrible at keeping these kind of records. As you can tell from this site, if you've looked it over, a lot of my photographic life has been spent happily exprimenting with different aspects of cameras and gear. You'd think from this I'd develop a habit of carefully noting down important aspects of various endeavours, but no, I usually figure if I try something again, I'll have the same knowledge base and probably manage to stumble through again. I did carry a small notebook around and occasionally made use of it, as when I did the shots for the Perspective Control lens page, where I knew that if I didn't write down the extent of the shift, etc., I'd never remember it later. But most of the time I take my pictures with enough technical confidence that they're going to work that I don't bother recording exposure information to dissect later what went wrong.

I decided, though, that maybe what I needed was a better and more convenient format for noting down relevant photographic details. I gave it some thought, mocked some pages up, and came up with my Exposure Record Book, posted as a PDF file so you can see what I did and print one out and make your own if you like.

Here's my reasoning behind the layout:

• It's sized to fit in a men's shirt pocket, so it's easy to carry and get to.
• It's twenty lines long. Two pages will cover every frame in a 36 exposure roll, if I were that anal, which I'm not. One page will handle a roll of 220 film in a Mamiya 7, though not in my Mamiya 6 if I made notes on every single frame.
• I didn't number the lines. If I get motivated enough to record some exposures, it's usually only for a limited series for a special purpose in a roll, not every last frame.
• I dumped the superfluous stuff. Why write down "f/" or "1/" every time when it's always the same and all that changes is the number? If I do 2 seconds and not 1/2, I just put "2s". If it's 2 minutes, I do "2m". Otherwise, the shutter speeds are all fractions.
• Put the year at the top and you can get by on month and day for the date, and in whichever order you personally prefer.
• If you're like me, you have a limited lens selection, so instead of carefully writing down "Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 AIS" for lens, I scrawl "20" and it's pretty clear which lens it is.
• I left the back of each page blank to collect names, phone numbers, recipes, etc.
• I cut up a grey card to bind it in so now I have a grey card with me all the time. The grey card covers also give it the rigidity to allow you to write in it while holding it instead of requiring some support. I personally bound the grey cards so the front cover is grey to the outside, the rear is grey to the inside (and thus protected).
• I spiral-bound it so it can stay open to the current page in my pocket.
• I printed it myself on Crane 100% cotton rag paper so it won't fade. Think what DaVinci's original notebooks are worth, or Darwin's, or Ansel Adams'! Think of the wisdom they contain! One day, eager young students may pore over my photo notebook and say, quizzically, "I'm not sure, but I think it's a recipe for pizza dough", and, depending on the page, they could be right.
• Want to make one? Just (a) print out one of the pages from the PDF file (b) copy it onto nice, heavy-ish paper, preferably with a high cotton rag content (c) get yourself a grey card (d) go to kinko's and use their nice rotary trimmers to trim very close to the side and bottom of thes sheets, but leave some room at the top for the binding (e) cut the grey card to the same size and (f) have kinko's bind this with the appropriate sized spiral binding. I was actually thinking about having some made up to sell, so if you're interested, let me know, otherwise, you're welcome to use my layout to do your own.

And that's my Exposure Record Book. Take a look at the page, print one out, and give it some thought. Feel free to make your own. I have a couple of reams of this superb Crane 100% cotton paper, but if I didn't, I'd look in the resume paper section at your local stationery or office supply store for something similar. If you have suggestions or comments regarding the Exposure Record, drop me an email and I might incorporate them.

Note: A couple of years after posting this, I was searching for archival slide mount labels and ran into the Photo Safaris site. John Shaw is quoted on there. Here's what he said:

You might have noticed that nowhere in my database is there any record of camera and lens, film, or exposure. I dont know anyone who keeps track of this information. All that info you see published its all made up. Its reasonably correct, since any pro can look at an image and tell how he or she took it. But still, its not recorded anywhere.

I guess you can just make up that stuff! Now I don't feel quite so bad about not recording all my exposures!