Expired Film Club Photographer’s Tips on Traveling Through Airport Security
If there’s a photographer who knows a thing or two about traveling through airports with film, it’s Miles Myerscough-Harris of Expired Film Club.
Myerscough-Harris became an online sensation for using old film cameras and celluloid that is well past its due date. He now travels the world covering sports events and capturing famous faces.
Anyone who has ever traveled with film knows that taking it through airport security can produce anxiety as there is always a concern that the scanners could spoil photos.
“The very first thing to say is don’t worry,” Myerscough-Harris says in a recent Instagram post. “I’ve taken hundreds of flights with film on me but I can honestly say that there’s only been one or two occasions where I’ve ever noticed even the faintest bit of damage.”
Nevertheless, Myerscough-Harris says an analog shooter should always ask for a hand search when traveling through airport security.
“I’d say I have about a 50 or 60 percent success rate with this,” he says. “Sometimes they’re fine and particularly newer airports with new CT scanners, the staff have been trained to know that those scanners will damage film.”
However, most airports have older scanners that use X-ray. These scanners are not as powerful, and that can mean the staff are less likely to want to hand search, or hand check a roll of film.
“Sometimes they will insist on you putting your film through the scanners,” he adds.
Myerscough-Harris says that low ISO film, 100 to 200, is unlikely to be damaged by X-ray scanners. But for higher ISO film, say 3200, he has a Domke bag that protects from radiation.
The photographer says that some security officers at the airport will not hand-check a roll of film no matter what he says to them. “It can be a bit of an unpleasant experience sometimes,” he adds.
But he insists it’s not worth the stress since out of the “thousands and thousands” of film rolls he’s taken through the airport, only one or two of them has shown any kind of damage.
“In my personal experience, if you’ve got a roll of film that goes through an X-ray scanner once or twice don’t worry about it.”
Image credits: Header photo partly licensed via Depositphotos.