Why I still make contact sheets
Scanning a roll gives you thirty-six separate pictures. A contact sheet gives you one: the roll as a sequence, with every hesitation and every second try in order. Most of what I learn about a day of shooting I learn from the sheet, not from the prints.
My routine is simple. Negatives go into a sleeve, the sleeve goes under a sheet of glass on grade 2 paper, and I give it the minimum time that renders the film base as a full black. That one test strip tells me whether the roll is thin or dense before I spend paper on anything else.
I mark the sheet with a grease pencil: a box around the frames worth printing, a cross through the ones I keep repeating and should stop taking.