Developing C-41 colour film using black and white chemicals

I’ve wanted to experiment with this for a while to see how well it would work to process C-41 colour film using black and white chemicals, however I’ve not had any opportunity to try it out but after recently purchasing a Olympus OM20 and finding an old roll of Kodak Gold GC 400 inside it, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to do so I fired of what was left on the roll and got it ready to develop. 

Developing colour film can be expensive whether you do it yourself or send it off so rather than waste time and money sending off a film that could have been blank I decided to try developing it using black and white chemicals,

Being honest I had no idea where to start so I went straight to google to find other people who have tried similar things to get some hints and tips. 

In theory the process is the same some people added a few extra minutes onto the timings others experimented with the temperature a lot of people suggest using warmer developing temperatures but as expected an image still appears either way, I decided to process the film using stand developing as this is my go to method and can compensate for a lot as from my research a lot of the photos can come out a lot less striking and looking a bit flat due to a lack of tonal deviation. 

I did make sure my water was around 20° although I think I’d like to experiment with going warmer next time while developing and see if that improved the image quality at all.

I got a very grainy image this way and it’s definitely worth a lot of post production to adjust the contrast but overall it’s a handy process to know.

by no means will I purposely buy colour film to process this way but if I ever have a film that I think is a bust or I have some expired film to use up this is a cheap and easy way of finding out if there’s anything on the roll. 

These aren’t my best shots but show the tone and quality of C-41 film when developed using black and white chemicals. 

What’s also fascinating is these images were taken on expired film after years of it being in the camera, some of the earlier photos taken by the previous owner must have been on fresher film and the outcome of the tones and images are very different (images on ‘finding film’post)