Downtown Camera Ltd.

It’s time for another post from the wonderful 🍃🌊

Today we ask Rob…
What is your favorite subject matter? Tell us about it.
I am very inspired by rendering motion in an artistic way using the trichrome process. To understand how, I want to describe a little bit about the trichrome process itself. A trichrome photograph is made up of 3 individual B&W film exposures. Each of the 3 film exposures is taken with one of a red, green, and blue colour filter. Then, each developed and scanned exposure is assigned to a colour channel in a program like Photoshop. So the red filter exposure becomes the red channel, the green filter exposure becomes the green channel and the blue filter exposure becomes the blue channel. When those channels are assigned, you get a colour image! I think this process is amazing, and I especially love infrared trichromes because of the surrealness of the image that is created. The look is quite similar to Kodak’s Aerochrome colour film.

What’s fascinating to me about trichromes is that anything that moves in between the exposures gets captured like a sort of “colour shadow”. In trichrome terms this is called the “Harris Shutter Effect”. This is why I had such a great time photographing the wind turbines because I could time the exposure to incorporate different effects from the rotating turbine blades.

The best part of all of that is each trichrome image originates from black and white film which I developed myself, so I’m still in control of my own process.

So right now, I’m thinking about different subjects that move in an interesting way, and how to best photograph those subjects using the trichrome process.