Learned Something Yesterday - A Happy Mistake

[DavidKKHansen]

I believe you can develop any film in b&w chemicals, even slide film.

I remember seeing somewhere that a guy had souped Kodachrome in Rodinal, after he no longer could have them developed at Dwaynes.

 

[bigeye]

MM, I think the quality of your picture-taking is selling the method more than the processing!

B&W film is safe with me, but I would not have expected C-41 to come out this good.

- Charlie

 

[gsgary]

Holy crap thats awesome. I had no idea. And the photo looks terrific!

Perhaps this is a new method of processing color at home? 🙂

EDIT: I assume the colors were messed up which is why you converted it to BW?

XP2 and T400cn are B+W film but should be developed in C41
This is color film developed in Rodinal, not great photos but it was out of date film so i was experimenting

 

[gsgary]

I thought I would share one more from the roll as I finally got back to it. After this little accident, I might start experimenting a lot more with this to do it on purpose. I'm starting to dig the look.

I think it looks great

 

[gsgary]

This is in line with what my experience was. I exposed as normal and had to really add some exposure in post to make it work.

When i scaned mine i did very little to them in photoshop and did not alter exposure, one more XP2

 

[alienmeatsack]

I did this same exact thing last night!

I keep my color rolls when exposed in translucent film containers and the BW in the black ones. Mostly so I can tell them apart quickly.

Normally I load my changing bag with everything but the film and then hand carry the film into the bag when I am actually going to do the spooling. I do this so I have to open the film container, look at the film and note if its color or BW so I don't make the mistake of doing what happened last night. Well, last night I just shoved the 2 containers into the bag, assuming since both were back canisters that both were BW film.

Nope. When I got done and was pulling the film out to finger squeegee, I noticed one roll had a grey background. I thought "well that's my first roll that didn't come out" then realized it was color film.

I was pleasantly surprised at the results, even if it stunk that I did it accidentally.

This is the first image off the roll, scanned as color to preserve the sepia tone. No real adjustments, just cropped the edges.

 

[Ezzie]

As I said, I do this on purpose. This is Portra BW400CN, and I really like the mid tones, and shadows, but not to partial about highlights. This one has little of the latter, thankfully.


Three of a kind by Eirik0304, on Flickr

 

[semrich]

I've been following this thread since it was first posted, because when I was in Nepal I was shooting so much I thought I was going to run out of B&W film, so I found some color film and shot five rolls during the rest of the trip. I didn't run out of B&W either. I really prefer shooting B&W so i figured if using B&W chemistry works, in a pinch, I could find some color film and shoot that.

I picked a roll from the five and was going experiment with it but didn't know what developer or times to use. finally I said to myself "the photos in this thread were done by accident with the developer of choice for B&W, I'm just going to have an accident on purpose."

Here is a shot with FujiColor ProPlus II 200 shot at 200 and developed in DD-X 1+4 9 min at 20c my standard for HP5 at 400.

 

[Sejanus.Aelianus]

It's good that you guys have discovered that colour film can be developed in the same way as monochrome. However, this is nothing new at all. Way back in the 'seventies, there were several articles in the UK magazines about this very trick.

I think it was set off by the availability of cheap, outdated negative film. At the time, colour film was sold with quite short expiry dates and once those were past, the film was massively discounted. When Tri-X was ten shillings and sixpence, you could pick up a roll of out-dated Kodacolor for two and sixpence - less than a quarter of the price.

I bought a few cheap rolls and tried it myself but I found the negatives difficult to print, so I went back to using bulk film, which was only slightly more expensive than the discounted colour.