Making a contact sheet of a roll of film you plan to work with is a really good idea. Not only will it give you a preview of each image, allowing you to more carefully choose which you would like to print, and make it very simple in the future to find an image that you’re looking for, especially if you store the contact sheet with the sheet of negatives, but it will also give you a good idea of how each image should be exposed and how similar the images are in exposure time.

You will be letting a lot of light through the lens for a contact sheet, since there is no negative in the negative carrier. Make a test strip for your contact sheets just like you would for printing a larger image from a negative. Once you get an exposure time down for contact sheets on an enlarger, you can do many contact sheets with relative speed.

Glass easels, or what might be called contact printers or printing frames, are convenient tools for getting good contact sheets. You place the sheet of negatives underneath the glass and line up a piece of paper underneath. The images should be right side up so that they are exposed correctly on the paper. Some negative sleeve sheets have a larger sleeve on the back so that you can slide a piece of 8 x 10 paper directly inside for perfect alignment. (There are more handy in color darkrooms where there is no safelight.) The glass easel will compress the negatives and paper and the final result will be a sharper set of small images.