It’s been a while since I made any serious attempt at color photography. The other day, I was perusing my library and stumbled upon a few shots over water. That reminded me I meant to post that picture, but to this day it is still sitting in my drafts and been there for well over a year. It’ll stay there until I have more time to write my thoughts on cross processing.

While that thought festers and ferments, here is my second attempt from this past weekend where I decided to try again to see the world through a different lens and use cross processed film simulation on my Ricoh GR III. This is a JPEG straight out of the camera. Unlike analog cross-processed film where the results can be downright wacky, yet beautiful, Ricoh’s take on a cross process is much more subtle and nuanced, merely playing with lower contrast, shifting the hue towards green cooler tones, and giving the entire photo a wash of blue cast. I quite like it. The skies colors shift more towards the turquoise side (my most favorite color of all times), reds much subdued and even purples somehow have a colder look to them.

I have enjoyed playing with the settings to find “that perfect look” I was after until I finally found it and decided to store it as one of my three user presets on the GR, replacing the high contrast B&W preset, which had been a staple of my set up ever since I converted to the GR. Times go by and we change with them. Though I will still shoot monochrome, especially on my infrared GR, because I genuinely believe that to really learn photography, one must learn to see light values and B&W is the best way to do it. I will endeavor much deeper into color photography and keep things in balance.

So, as the trees and their reflections in water cannot be without each other, in cross processing, color negative and color positive chemistry and films cannot live without one another, and so cannot color and monochrome photos.