Blue Bleach Bypass
Ever pushing the boundaries of odd techniques in kitchen development – I decided in the middle of a hectic and busy developing session recently to try something a bit odd. Cross processed, bleach bypass slide film.
An experiment in blue
Quite what led me to this, I am not sure. It seemed a good idea at the time. Cross Processing film is always quite fund, and something I do a lot at home, as I rarely shoot enough E6 to make it worth investing in sort lived expensive chemicals, and I have used the bleach bypass process a few times, both for creative effect and for films which I think are quite old and may have lost sensitivity as this leaves the silver image in place.
The negatives were very very dark, needing quite a lot of scanning trickery. I tried a few ideas finally settling on auto exposure scanning as slide film to create a basic tiff file in negative. I then loaded these into photoshop and inverted them. Finally I set the levels for each colour channel individually to stretch the histogram by setting the sliders to each end of the “hump”. I tweaked this a little as needed to get a pleasing, if odd, effect.
The result is these captivating almost cyanotype like images.
Gallery
