I'm glad I didn't throw out the packet of paper when I discovered it was heavily fogged. It was 10 sheets of 30x40cm Ilford MG WT semi-matt, a lovely paper, but apparently this packet had sat far too long. Mulling over whether I should bin it, I eventually thought why not print on it with heavy overexposure and then bleach it back? The bleach should remove the fog, and with it also the overexposure, leaving me with a normal print. At least that was my hope and I'm glad to say I wasn't too far off. Of course, snatching the print from the bleach at just the right moment (like in lith printing) would be critical. As would be the "right" dilution of the bleach. I used the bleach that came with Tetenal's sepia toner kit. If, like me, you prefer a fairly dilute bleach, then what comes with the kit is way more than what's needed for sepia toning.
So I went mad with those ten sheets. Cutting them up, using various negatives etc. Many were destined for the bin, but some looked good. I re-fixed the good ones and even put them through selenium toner just for the heck of it. I had gone this far, I might as well go all the way to the end. Interestingly, all prints have a very strong yellow tint, including the border.
This photo of the volcano Bromo on the island of Java is one of the better prints, if not the best print I was able to make from that fogged paper. The picture is from a month long trip to Indonesia in 2019. Trying not to loose my balance on the thin ridge of volcanic dust (tumble down the wrong direction and you're in serious trouble), I squeezed off several frames, trying to get a good-looking plume within the black abyss. I used a Leica M6 with a Zeiss 28/2.8 lens. The film was FP4+.
By the way, this is a straight colour scan of the print and on my monitor it looks exactly like the print itself. Well done CanoScan 9000 Mark something!
And here is a video of the environs at the same spot. Man, what a stunningly wild and beautiful landscape!