I had loaded a roll of Kodak Tri-X 400 black and white film in one of my Hasselblad film backs intending to use it one night, but never got around to it. It was just sitting there for a while taking up space, so I decided to finally try out a technique I had learned about in a YouTube video (love this channel, btw!). This method, referred to as trichrome photography, allows you to produce some rudimentary color photos using black and white film. I started with a "dry run" on my X-Pro2 just to make sure I had the technique down before burning through film--basically, you line up a composition and take three sequential monochrome exposures using red, green, and blue filters, making sure to keep the exposure roughly equivalent when accounting for light loss through the filter. This next part can still be done in an analog fashion, but digital files and Photoshop make it much easier: import each of these as the "R," G," and "B" channels, respectively, and line everything up. Voila! Now you have a pretty terrible color photograph that took way too much effort to make and has all sorts of weird misregistration artifacts!

Anyway, emboldened by some modest success with the digital method, I set up my 500 c/m with the 150 f/4 lens and grabbed three exposures of the scene you see above. I was using a metered pentaprism, which made setting the exposures dead simple since it was all TTL. As I was about to shoot I noticed a lone sailboat drifting into frame, which was a perfect bit of serendipity--this added a cute little element to the scene and, perhaps more importantly, an easy way to tell which exposure was which just by noting its progress passing from left to right. The blue one is a bit hard to make out, but those three colorful little vessels are the same white sailboat!

I chose this composition because it provided a strong, immobile central subject (the bridge, obvously!) with lots of little shifting variable details to demonstrate some of the wild uncanny effects you can get with trichrome photography. My favorite is probably the otherworldly iridescence of the water surface, though other elements like the misaligned-projection-TV clouds or the technicolor specters of the passing traffic add to the subtle weirdness of the scene. I took a few others similar photos that day, but this was definitely the standout for me--it's also worth noting that you can only make 4 of these in 6x6 on a 120 roll (or fewer if you happen to bump your tripod in the middle of a series! who would do that?? :')). If you want to learn some more about this technique and other early approaches to color photography, I highly recommend this video by Technology Connections (another favorite YT channel!).

this is the one text exposure I did, taken on my om-4ti, on the same roll as my other desert images for my big project: hp5+ pushed to 1600. i predicted that since i'm pushing the film til it screams, a color photo taken on it would have a characteristic "sick as hell" look that's unique to trichrome, since color grain and b&w grain function differently (dye clouds vs. silver crystals)

I want to do this more seriously and more, but I need proper separation filters and maybe a calibration target for the foreground corner. I'd love a color wheel but there is no turnkey solution for this, so I'd have to build one.

earlier this year I missed out on a "Devin" one-shot large-format tricolor camera, which used three film holders with individual filters and an enormous beamsplitter prism. I felt it would be ideal for me since my name is also Devin, but a snipe bidder decided they'd pay more than $450 for it

check out this banger i took a few years ago