X-Ray Machines and The Friends of Film

I’ve been home for just over a couple of weeks after being away for 2 ½ weeks before that in Spain and Portugal. Part family vacation, part working tour of the two countries, travelling 2000 km with my wife and two children south from Madrid to Granada then west to Portugal before flying back out of Madrid 17 days later.

The "children" are adults in their 20s living elsewhere. Getting all four of us in the same place at the same time for something other than a funeral gets harder every year. The ostensible tag on this trip was to celebrate our 30th Anniversary on Sept. 2 as a married couple. We wanted to do something extraordinary, maybe to express how extraordinary it is to celebrate thirty years together!

Lots of film went on the trip!

Our daughter Zoe is a photographer in her own right. She works with color and Instax films. Check out her site here.

From my stack, 17 rolls of Kodak Tri X and Ilford FP4 came back exposed. One a day on average. Which is not the way it goes.

So far I’ve processed all the film and made contact sheets of each roll. And last night for the first time, I went through them with a loupe and a pen, over the light box, marking images of interest. 50 in the first round. Of those, 15 or 20 are potential gums!

Going through airports with film is always a circus. It seems every airport and every security guard has his or her own take on what to do with film at the security station. Some are willing to bypass the x-ray machine and simply do a hand check. They are the true friends of film. Then there are the other officers who are not friends of film.

Film should never be transported in checked bags because those x-ray machines are a lot more powerful than the ones used to check your carry-ons.

Over the years, those carry-on machines have gotten safer for film. I think the signs say film under 800 ISO is safe. Having encountered officers over the years who are not friends of film, I know that sending a roll of Tri-X 400 film through the machine doesn’t fog film like it did years ago. But then again, I still have a few lead lined bags for placing film in to shield the film from the x-rays. Can you imagine going through security in this day and age with a lead bag?

On the other hand, I still worry about the cumulative effect of the same roll of film passing through one airport x-ray machine after another. This trip, involved several connecting flights and a couple of layovers. All in all, we passed through security 8 times! So I like to ask before putting my film through the machine. There's a good chance one of the Friends will be there to hand check if you ask.

The remains of the day!