This photo was included in my Trichromatic post, but I thought I'd take another pass at its editing and look at it as a stand-alone image.

I was a bit more flexible for processing for this version. I adjusted the hue and brightness of different colours for contrast and emphasis, and blended versions with different types of colour shift. Most of the changes are small, but they add up to a more finished photo.

Something that's in the back of my mind whenever I tweak photos in Lightroom, and comes to the forefront when I try to do something more ambitious, is just how bad an editor it is. Capture One is so, so much better. I couldn't do everything I need here in C1, but it's so clear that Lightroom is limited to make people need something better. (And that's not even the 'mobile' version.) Adobe probably expects that to be more of their software, but that's all part of a hostile design.

Back to the results: I'm not sure what I'll do with it. It would be fun to send in for my critique group. But a single photo isn't much without a broader context. It could be the start of a longer series, maybe – tricolour street photos with unremarkable backgrounds that are on the other side of the road from tourist attractions.

Red, Green, Blue.

Looking at the individual frames shows me where I could do better. The red frame doesn't add anything; I liked the two people standing in front of the doors, but they're too small for significance and don't contribute to the finished photo. It's only luck that also had the group on the right, which turned out to be more important. Still, I should have waited for something more interesting.

The green frame, the second of three, has the key action. I wanted to wait a fraction longer, but the dog looked at me, so that was that. For the blue frame I was looking for the near couple to fill the center of the photo, and timed it for when the person with the suitcase was mid-stride. It was mostly luck that it also matched some of the action from the red frame.

One of the things that I like, a small detail, is that there's a visible luggage tag on the stroller. It's nice to think that I live in a place that other people travel to see, and are excited to be in. Or are happy to be home to. A pinhole camera can capture the essence of a scene, but not details like that.

Thinking about this photo shows some other ideas that I had too late to explore here.

One is that I forget that I'm using 35mm film, and thus have an over-abundance of frames on a roll. There's no reason why I shouldn't try taking a couple of frames with each colour filter, and then choose which ones work best in combination after the fact. The only new problem that needs to be solved for that to work, especially for a scene like this where the light isn't changing, is tracking which colours were used for each frame. As long as I decide on a system and stick with it I'll be fine.

The other idea is to examine why I'm doing this at all, and what I want from it. Is it enough to just look at all the cool artifacts from using black and white film to record colour photos? That's certainly what's motivated me so far, and that's a lot of fun. I like to imagine visiting a city that's more interesting than mine, and while I'm there it would be nice to create some tricolour results using the black and white film that I prefer. So I take that proficiency seriously.

But I should also explore it as another form of creative multiple exposure photography. The same scene recorded different times, as here, is a start. But it could also be a way of combining different scenes, possibly leveraging common elements or similar compositions, for more interpretive results. Colour as a way of identifying and organizing layers; the combination of colours to create something new that shows the scene differently. Just because it's a way of recreating colour photographs doesn't mean that then have to be literal, descriptive photos. So that's where I think I'll go with this next.