One of the most frequently discussed topics in any film photography Facebook group is traveling with film. Newbies and old hands alike will share experiences of transiting through various airports, detailing their success rate of asking for hand checks of their film with security staff.
If you’ve seen any of these discussions, you’ll notice that people are often in two camps: “it will be fine” or “it will be toast.” I’m generally in the “it will be fine" camp, but if you asked me what would happen to a roll of film that went through an x-ray machine 19 times, I wouldn’t be so optimistic.
The results from that very scenario are brought to you in this video by Bryan Hong. Hong details his experience taking a roll of Kodak T-Max P3200 black and white film through x-ray machines 19 times. Although this film has 3200 on the box, it’s nominally an ISO 800 film that’s designed to be pushed two stops.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that a roll of film going through x-rays that many times would not produce very good results. The results in the video, however, might just surprise you.
Although this does give film photographers a bit of hope when traveling with film, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. This test was only carried out on x-ray machines and not the dreaded new breed of CT scanners.
There was an architectural photographer that I knew back in the film days who spent one year shooting 200 buildings all over the US for a single company. He travelled constantly and said x-rays had absolutely no effect on his slide film. That was way back in the 90s though so I have no idea if things have changed with the new technology at airports.
Yes I think the fear of the unknown (new scanners) is more of a problem, especially with new film shooters.
In the late 80s my photographer friend sent a cardboard box with 60 rolls of high-ISO slide film through the X-ray scanners at LAX about 30 times in a row.
We used that fogged slide film to shoot fashion, loved the "special effect".
It was a pain going into LAX so we didn't do it again.
I love how LA shooters are like no problemo we'll just add xrays to our workflow :)
The model is fantastic!
wow, very cool! love it
I'd rather see someone just taking films through 3 scanners and see what happens. That's more of a real life scenario.