I have been recovering the now-discontinued Fuji FP100C negatives for as long as I’ve been shooting it (admittedly, only about a year or two). That’s a subject for a different blog post, in fact, the blog post of a fellow Filmwaster Moomian Sean. Read about it here.
I am by no means an expert at the technique. For evidence of my non-expertness, just look at this negative recovery: 
See the lines and waves especially at the far right where the bleach got under the negative and started to bleach it away? Well, instead of lamenting the fact that I didn’t get it perfect, my thoughts instead turned to “how can I do this on purpose”? And so started my new project: intentionally fucking with negatives using bleach.
I shot two rolls of Fuji Superia 35mm. The first one, I took household bleach (the same bleach that got under that FP100C negative above) and diluted it 1:10, then threw in 100mL (enough to cover about 1/2 of the roll) and immediately dumped it out and washed the negatives thoroughly. The bleach was in the development tank for about 10 seconds. After washing, I developed the roll normally.
The second roll, I developed it normally, and then at the very end, after it was fixed, I pulled out the whole roll and immersed it in the same 10% bleach solution. Guess what?? Nothing happened. So I added enough bleach to make it a 50% solution, and that’s when I started to see the same white stuff (bubbles?) that I saw when recovering the FP100C negatives, so I knew SOMEthing was happening. I swirled the negs around, and rubbed the emulsion side a little to emulate what happened when I was recovering the FP100C negs. The whole bleaching process took a good 5 minutes or so, until I started to see something happening to the negatives. Then I washed them and dried them.
So here, finally, are the results. First, the pre-bleach. Not much to see here, a bit of a color shift, and definitely a washed-out (dare I say, bleached?) look. I increased the exposure and pulled back the blacks on all of these.
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Now the fun part — the post-bleached negs. I’ll let them speak for themselves.
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Massive color shifts (mostly beaching out the red layer, it would seem) and nice coffee stain looks on the edges. Full disclosure: there were a few that didn’t have any of that stuff, and once I applied some basic color correction and white balance, looked pretty normal.
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