What happens when you put your film in checked baggage?

Answer: you get weird-ass bars and waves in your photos.

Yeah, ok, so I’m an idiot.

I just went on a multi-state tour performing music and took a lot of photos along the way. Despite all the interwebs warning me not to, I put about a dozen rolls of film in my checked baggage on two flights. I actually thought this was the safe thing to do; as you may have noticed, the carry-on baggage screening warns against putting high-speed (ISO 800 or greater) film through the x-ray machines; although all my film was 400 or slower I figured “why chance it? I’ll just keep it in my checked luggage”.

Little did I know that airport security also subjects your baggage (and any film therein) to different forms of electromagnetic radiation, apparently to detect explosives or whatever. And being the idiot I am, when I processed the rolls of film at home and 3 of the 4 I developed came out with weird artifacts on the film, I just assumed I had loaded the spools wrong or something. It wasn’t until I took one of them in to get scanned that the helpful folks set me straight.

Maybe you guys knew this already, and in that case, kudos to you. But I actually found the effects to be more interesting — and worse — that I imagined. Googling “film in checked baggage” suggests that it will “fog” your film, which sounds like it’s not desirable but probably something you can just massage out with some curve adjustments in photoshop. No…it fucks it up pretty decent.