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Thread: 4x5 FP4 survives a dozen airport scans

  1. #31

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    Re: 4x5 FP4 survives a dozen airport scans

    I've flown a fair amount for work over the last 50 years. Stopped counting 15 or 20 years ago when it was between 2000 and 3000 flights - might be up to 4000 or more by now for all I know. Including over 200 round trips between US and Japan.

    Let's say I carried a camera and film on half of them so somewhere around 2000 times. I had film fogged once. Auckland to Sydney in the summer of 1986, when they were still using old scanners. More recent trips through Auckland - no problem. I've stopped worrying about it. I'm more concerned with how many times my brain has been fried at high altitudes.

  2. #32

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    Re: 4x5 FP4 survives a dozen airport scans

    "Faulty logic. Do you limit your driving so as to lessen the chance of getting hit by a drunk driver?"

    Yes. Driving near bars in our area late on Friday and Saturday is foolish. Why chance it when I can take another route or do something else? There are good reasons for the Drunk Driver checkpoints.

    Not getting on your Doremus, just reality where you know the bars and when the drinkers tend to start going home. Have pulled too many of them from the ditch, stuck in snow and such when their inebriation contributed to poor driving.

    As for the scanners we know that not all countries inspect and check things as often as they might. Knowing some who have had fogging problems, confirmed by Eastman Kodak tech guys - why not be as safe as possible. I seldom fly these days and when I did before most(not all) of the inspection/scanner folk were decent. Some very helpful. Best was getting those interested in Photography who were interested in the 5x7 and 8x10 and I actually had time to visit with them before boarding. Then there were a few pricks - Salt Lake City had more of of these than other airports when flying often years ago.
    ” Never attribute to inspiration that which can be adequately explained by delusion”.

  3. #33

    Re: 4x5 FP4 survives a dozen airport scans

    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Andrada View Post
    I've flown a fair amount for work over the last 50 years. Stopped counting 15 or 20 years ago when it was between 2000 and 3000 flights - might be up to 4000 or more by now for all I know. Including over 200 round trips between US and Japan.

    Let's say I carried a camera and film on half of them so somewhere around 2000 times. I had film fogged once. Auckland to Sydney in the summer of 1986, when they were still using old scanners. More recent trips through Auckland - no problem. I've stopped worrying about it. I'm more concerned with how many times my brain has been fried at high altitudes.
    Cudos for the extensive experience as a passenger. Back in the day they even had smoking sections on flights if you can wrap your head around that concept in todays reality. But realistically, that was then and this is now and that experience is absolutely meaningless. International terrorists constantly looking for a weak point in the airline / airport security systems and drug smugglers doing the same thing causes a dynamic response to security intelligence on the fly for which the average person trying to go from point A to point B has no clue. Add to that the fact that if you get caught in this unpredictable noise there is no fall back position because all of the efforts to dial in the consummate image is meaningless. This cowboy has decided to take the high road and try to take this risk out of the equation. As is always the case, you can always roll the dice at your convenience.

  4. #34

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    Re: 4x5 FP4 survives a dozen airport scans

    I think the point was that back in the day x ray scanning was pretty bad and used high doses. They also were more cavalier about human exposure. Remember x ray machines in shoe stores? Modern machines have never fogged any of my film. I think the probability of FedEx losing it is higher than the probability of x ray systems fogging it. To each their own.

  5. #35

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    Re: 4x5 FP4 survives a dozen airport scans

    Quote Originally Posted by Willie View Post
    "Faulty logic. Do you limit your driving so as to lessen the chance of getting hit by a drunk driver?"

    Yes. Driving near bars in our area late on Friday and Saturday is foolish. Why chance it when I can take another route or do something else? There are good reasons for the Drunk Driver checkpoints.

    Not getting on you Doremus, ...
    No offense taken. But, to defend my logic a bit, I was trying to find an example of being unreasonably cautious, with the result that one's lifestyle is negatively affected (keyword here is "unreasonable"). Certainly, avoiding a stretch of road that is particularly dangerous, for whatever reason, is justifiable. Being housebound because of unreasonable paranoia about getting into a traffic accident isn't. We all take calculated risks, weighing the potential benefits against the odds of something going wrong. My point in this discussion being that avoiding flying with film entirely because there is an extremely slight chance that one's film may get damaged by an x-ray scanner is unreasonable.

    My car got backed into in the supermarket parking lot the other day. That's not going to stop me from shopping...

    Best,

    Doremus

  6. #36

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    Re: 4x5 FP4 survives a dozen airport scans

    Bringing an older thread back to life because I just came back from a week in South Carolina with my 4x5, and had what in the end was merely a humorous trip through TSA on the return. I'm of the school that believes the scan of hand luggage is OK for film, so long as there are only a couple of scans (in this case outbound and return). Still, I figured my backpack, with the Canham might cause issues because the inspectors wouldn't recognize the scan of a folded 4x5. I asked my wife to take the exposed and unexposed film, and the holders with exposed film (just shot that morning, no way to unload in the dark), since her pack was unlikely to raise questions. So when both packs were pulled aside after their scan, I was a bit worried about what might happen next. Turned out that my pack was pulled aside not because of the camera, but because of questions about the food we had packed for the flight (apple slices, tangerines, some bread and cheese). My wife's (I was thinking of horror stories about opening film boxes) not because of anything photographic, but because the spray bottle of insect repellant was over the liquid allowance. So some concerns that turned out to be nothing other than unexpected. (Will start developing negatives tonight, but expect that any problems will be my own mistakes, not the scanners.)

  7. #37

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    Re: 4x5 FP4 survives a dozen airport scans

    In India and Pakistan the hotels have X-ray scanners at the front door so getting your film scanned once or twice is unavoidable until they recognise you after a few days. Their airports have scanners when you enter and then at customs and again through security. Coming out at the other airport get another scan going through Customs. My roll film must have gotten scanned over 30 times during my trip to Delhi, Karachi, and Lahore. I didn’t see any damage from the scans and some of those scanners were ancient. I scanned and made a pdf album from the Lahore shoot.

  8. #38

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    Re: 4x5 FP4 survives a dozen airport scans

    I was flying back from Schiphol airport in Amsterdam a few weeks ago and saw they had the new 3D scanners the ones that look like CT scanners in hospitals. I recall reading somewhere these 3D scanners take hundreds of images of your luggage to form a 3D image. While I have never seen ill effects on my film from normal x ray machine I was worried about the new ones. I was carrying lots of 135 film and asked for a hand check and they said yes. Whew. Any one has experience with these 3D scanners? I will have 100 sheets of 4x5 TMY through SFO and know they have the 3D scanners. I don’t want to risk TSA opening the box to swab the inside even if they ok hand check.

  9. #39
    Les
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    Re: 4x5 FP4 survives a dozen airport scans

    Overall, I don't think we (the flying public) can avoid the risk completely. Sending via Fedex is OK, but it's also a crapshoot - the film can be Xrayed at either direction. Swabbing or hand checks has its own risks (often not possible). The more flights you do on a particular trip, the more risks. So you take your odds. Developing the negatives there is cutting the risk by 50%. I think I'll stay on the ground, check out the leaf change on the E. Coast....or watch the volleyball in Canada.

    Les

  10. #40

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    Re: 4x5 FP4 survives a dozen airport scans

    I've asked for a hand check a few times and from the experience, I think the risk is greater some TSA person will open the film boxes.

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