travelling in heat with film?

[Drew Wiley]

All the above ideas work well enough, but the best insulation I've found is not an
ice chest but a good goosedown jacket. And there's plenty of evidence from the
big boys like Kodak about heat potentially messing with film, especially color film.
Lots of us have learned this the hard way, anyway.

[Frank Petronio]

I know my film lab guy, who does a lot of E6, which should be more sensitive than B&W and C41, says he has never seen it, even from all the landscape photographers who send them their film. Maybe his clientele is more careful, but with 30-years of lab experience you'd think you'd see it once if it was really such a problem.

I have had 6-year out of date film separate in the emulsion but I don't know the film storage history, I suspect it may have been damp more than hot. And I've had defective Ilford product. But otherwise I've never seen environmental damage done to my film, over MY 27-years of shooting.

Of course I don't leave film in the rear window shelf of car parked in Death Valley either....

[Drew Wiley]

Frank - why do you think 'pro' films sold at a premium were kept cold prior to sale, while amateur equivalents were not. The critical color balance was known to potentially shift. For certain kinds of work this is important. Care regarding heat in on
every color film tech sheet I've ever read. And even if the emulsion doesn't become
immediately affected, the life of the film does, and there's always a greater risk of the film buckling in the holders. Why ruin a trip through carelessness?

[Frank Petronio]

I'm not saying you don't throw a blanket over the film or try to park in the shade... but I wouldn't go through too much trouble over it either. I sure wouldn't waste money and stress out over it.

When I started doing commercial photography, the early 80s emulsions needed very subtle Wratten filtration to achieve neutral greys, you got wicked blue shadows, fabric moire, etc. The emulsions improved over time and by the mid-90s you almost never needed to use Wrattens because the film was so consistent and good. So nowadays I know the modern film is a lot more forgiving of environmental factors.

Sure Kodak and Fuji freeze and cold storage their film, and made a bigger fuss over the pro emulsions. They had to do something to convince you to pay double! But how was it structurally different than consumer film? It wasn't like they put extra dyes or silver into it -- instead you just had a more careful supply chain and they printed the emulsion numbers on the boxes. But nothing made EPN, EPP, EPN more expensive to manufacture than consumer film - it was only the handling and documentation.

Look at it the other way, don't you think Kodak and Fuji also strived to make their films less heat sensitive? It would be a big advantage for most consumers and stores... I doubt Walmart went out of their way to keep their Kodak Gold stock cool.

[Vaughn]

Frank -- FWIW...my understanding is that all color film shifts in color as it ages. Consumer film is shipped and sold without worrying about the shift -- as the customer would never know. Pro film is allowed to age to a certain point of known color shift, then stored cold to stop the aging process -- thus would have a consistent color balance from roll to roll.

[Pat Kearns]

When you get to CO go to Wal Mart and in the sporting goods section you can find a cooler made by California Innovations. There is one that has wheels and telescoping handle that holds about 24 beverage cans. The cooler is made to collapse and will fit in your luggage. Buy it, ziploc bags, water and ice. Put the film in the ziploc bags and the water on ice in the cooler. After a full day photographing in the heat your body will thank you for the cold water and your film will thank you for the cool storage.

[Drew Wiley]

Kodak has been crowing about pro Portra films being less heat sensitive than traditional
color neg films, and perhaps this applies to Ektar too, but at ten bucks a sheet I'm not
about to take any chances! Ice chests aren't that expensive. So I use them and park
in the shade.

[brianam]

Does anyone know about the affects of heat on infrared film?

I've shot a lot of IR in the desert, 35mm and 120 (not yet in sheets). Used HIE back-when, now I use the Rollei. I sometimes got a dimpled, gridded spot pattern embedded in the negatives. I thought it might have been a dimpled pressure plate in a 35mm camera (I have Olympus OM's, which have that) so I tried a Nikon F3 with a smooth plate. Still observed the issue, though less-so.

Was that the impact of heat? Is IR especially sensitive to it?

[Paul Kierstead]

I don't see how insulting the film can help over a long period. Without an ice pack, the interior of the cooler will rise to the ambient (for the cooler) temperature; this is inevitable. Heavy insulation will slow that rise, but it will also slow the decline. Unless you can slow it so much that it does not get to ambient before ambient declines, the peak temperature will be ambient. If the peak temperature goes by relatively quickly, the peak in the cooler will be less then peak ambient; however, it will still spend a great deal of time very hot; in fact, it will be much hotter in the cooler later in the day then even ambient is, unless some heat sensitive air exchange is used.

Adding something cold of course can change all that, until its heat sink ability is exhausted anyway.

[Frank Petronio]

At $10 a sheet plus processing on top of that, I'd just put it in a Brinks Armored Truck ;-)

Not to belabor the joy of beating the dead horse until it's further dead, but I am still waiting for someone to post evidence of heat damage to their film....