I’ve been excited to do this for a while now, and finally managed to! I went out on 28/4 and shot a roll of film attempting to do trichromatic photography. This is the process of taking three black and white photos with a red, green and blue filter, then combining them into a final colour image. I used the following:
- Canon A-1 + Canon FD 50mm f1.4
- Fujifilm Neopan Acros II 100
- Tiffen Red 25 filter
- Tiffen Blue 47 filter
- Tiffen Green 58 filter
I tried a few different combinations of exposure adjustments for the filters. This is what I settled on eventually:
- Red + 3 stops
- Green + 1.5 stops
- Blue + 2.5 stops
My process for taking each set of three photos was to first set up my tripod and frame the scene I wanted. Then I took a base reading, sometimes with a small handheld meter, sometimes with my phone. Next I would go through taking a shot with each filter, making exposure adjustments as I went according to the list above. I did let my camera automatically meter one set of shots and it did turn out fine though. Once they were developed and had flat scans done, I used GIMP to edit them together, and RawTherapee to touch them up.
Overall I had varying degrees of success, but I got some kind of colour image from every attempt I made, which is better than I had expected. I’ll go through each of the images in chronological order here.
This is the first one I took out in my garden. I let the camera meter these shots itself through the filters, and it turned out fine. I had a feeling it would be, but wanted to meter most of them myself anyway. There’s a distinct lack of colour in the sky, which is common through most of these. I think maybe either the blue channel is too weak, or maybe I need to meter more for the sky in the future.
These next two were the first I took after leaving. The first one isn’t very good in my opinion. It was a nightmare to align in GIMP (I’ll go more into why later) as there’s just so much going on at different distances.
This one was much easier to align, as the tree and the horizon give a more definite area to focus on. This is the first one I tried to edit, and has nice colours. Again though, the sky is very blank despite it being taken on a nice day with blue sky.
This is another that was very difficult to align, and I wasn’t expecting anything from it. But it actually turned out quite nice.
This one is interesting. I like how the water looks, but again the sky is white. I think that may be due to metering in the shade here though. I’m not sure what is in the bottom right. I was trying to get a bit of the tree I was sitting on in frame. Maybe it’s something to do with shadows?
This didn’t look very promising from the individual image, but turned out much better. I actually quite like it. There’s a pretty good amount of detail in the tree itself.
This is my second favourite photo out of all of them. The water came out well, the grass and reeds all look clear, and there’s some geese walking around on the other side of the water! The only unfortunate part is again, the sky.
Here is my favourite photo from this whole day, which was already posted in OPAD. I tried to get cars spread out across different distances for each frame, and succeeded. The sky also has some detail, and finally they’re probably the best aligned of all the photos. I aligned around the center and it turned out well.
I don’t have much to say about this one. It has more sky detail again, but if I knew how the skies were going to turn out overall I would’ve angled it down slightly.
This one is funny. I actually spun the camera in the tripod quick release when winding one of the shots, so I’m surprised I got anything from it. It’s very cropped due to misalignment, and you can see the red in the sky from it as well. I like it though it has a strange feel to it.
The final photo is a good example of what I think is called parallax error (I’m not sure). I aligned the images around the middle window of the church, but that caused the left, and the trees on the right to be misaligned. I think it’s a nice photo still, just something I’ll try and keep in mind next time.
In the end, I am very happy with this roll, and it makes me excited to try this again. There’s some things I will be changing next time though to address the issues I had:
- I’ll be borrowing a sturdier tripod as mine does wobble and collapse slowly.
- I’m currently waiting for some magnetic filter adapters. I think screwing filters on and off moved the camera a bit.
- I’ll use a motor drive I have for the Canon A-1. I’m not sure if it’ll help or not, but most of the movement I felt was from winding the film.
- I’ll try to frame things better in order to avoid what I think is called parallax error. Not sure how easy that’ll be though.
The next time I try this probably won’t be for a few weeks as it was quite tiring, and I have to wait for the filter adapters anyway. But I am looking forward to it. In the meantime, I will write up a post on how I edited the photos in GIMP. I had to use a very slow method due to the misalignment, maybe it’ll help others.
-- Lolei <3