Airport scanners

Did you actually have real film not a digital camera? The scanners use X-rays and depending on the scanner type, varying numbers of X-ray beams and power. Yes they can affect film, certainly fast film.

Sometime when Roentgen and the Curies were playing with the first ionising radiation sources, they discovered radiation screening. You can use lead. Or depleted Uranium. Depleted uranium is radioactive, but primarily Alpha emitter. So its radiation can be stopped with a few sheets of paper. But Uranium stops more X-rays than the same mass of lead. It's why X-ray staff in hospitals wear depleted Uranium aprons rather than lead - they can make the apron lighter and still stop more X-rays.

So unless the scanner staff look like characters from a Marvel comic-book or movie and are displaying super-powers, they are safe.

I wonder how many people still use real film? I saw someone young using a Pentax Spotmatic in 2023. First time I had seen a film camera in use in the general population for 15+ years.

More to the point, why do Boots sell disposable cameras? They were very popular at parties in the past, but surely everyone carries their camera-phone these days?

I guess wet-film is *much* harder to f*ck with if it's needed evidentially.

Or, to reverse the idea, which digital imaging system would *you* trust to be tamper proof.

Pentax recently released a new film camera. Seem that yoof has rediscovered fillum.

Last week I donated a disused Canon AE-1 35mm SLR to a photography student.

Sort of optical version of vinyl I suppose!

Because there’s a market for them. I know it seems unlikely in this day and age but I think they’re popular to give out to wedding guests etc.

Tim

Yes, we did that 22 years ago. Cheap, doesn't matter if one goes missing and a great opportunity to get other people's point of view.

Thanks for that.

Yes, as well as digital I use real film (when I get the odd bit of spare time I even experiment with glass plates!!!)

Digital and film are qualitatively different. I wouldn't say one is better than the other and for me it's a very subjective decision whether to use film or digital in a given situation.

Nick

I wouldn't be too confident about the resilience of film against fakery. The Cottingley Faries Hoax was over a hundred years ago and fooled many well-respected people for an awfully long time.

Nick

Good for you. I really ought to do the same with the cameras I no longer use. IMO there's nothing like analogue for really getting the feel for the relationship between sensitivity, time and aperture in recording light.

Nick

The only time I’ve seen ‘real’ film - and I’ve used the quotes - recently is in those instant photo / Polaroid like cameras.

We were looking through some stuff stored away the other day and found one of Olympus Trips I bought for our daughters. That was just digital cameras were becoming smaller but I wanted them to learn how to develop films etc.

Somewhere, I have at least one of the disc cameras. I’m not sure how it came my way. I doubt you can buy the discs for them now.

There is a real film movement. I volunteer in a museum and see them quite often.

Dave

Good to hear.

I was thinking more in every day use. People tend to reach for their phones even in situations where, at one time, you would have seen cameras by the dozen.

I confess, I have a compact system single lens camera ( Nikon J1). I rarely use it, even on holiday.

I prefer the term "photo-chemical" to "analogue" when discussing film cameras. After all the image forming part of both CMOS and CCD sensors are analogue in nature. This is particularly true of CCD as the ADC is external to the sensor chip.

"wet film" is just as descriptive

The latest "Computerised Tomography" (CT) scanners do seem to have been a backward step as far as camera film is concerned if reports around the web are to believed. (Yes, I know!).

If there is a problem the Canadians seem to be on the ball but I'd be prepared to bet that the way CT scanning for security has been sold many personnel may not know.

Do the new 3D CT X-ray machines use a higher dose?

"Aviation security

CT scanning has also found an application in transport security (predominantly airport security) where it is currently used in a materials analysis context for explosives detection CTX (explosive-detection device)[78][79][80][81] and is also under consideration for automated baggage/parcel security scanning using computer vision based object recognition algorithms that target the detection of specific threat items based on 3D appearance (e.g. guns, knives, liquid containers).[82][83][84] Its usage in airport security pioneered at Shannon Airport in March 2022 has ended the ban on liquids over 100 ml there, a move that Heathrow Airport plans for a full roll-out on 1 December 2022 and the TSA spent $781.2 million on an order for over 1,000 scanners, ready to go live in the summer. "

Sounds like it uses more than one exposure, so the amount of radiation is likely to be larger.

Paul