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I’m traveling to Spain via airport from Detroit, Michigan in the USA and I plan on bringing five or six packs of polaroid film with iso800 along with my pic-300 camera. My confusion lies with how I get the film through security. I’ve read that putting film in checked luggage is a bad idea and that you should put it in your carry on and request that it be hand checked. The problem with that is that I really don’t want to take a long time and cause a delay. Do you have any recommendations? Thanks

Asked by smell-bad

I’ve discussed traveling with film many times (in fact, Richard Mosse recently explained how he travels through Africa with cases of Kodak Aerochrome) and for most people if you are not shooting professionally, you can get away with putting your film through the security X-ray. The exceptions to this are medium format film, instant film and film which is 800 ISO or higher. So…. in your case requesting a hand check is pretty much your only option.

It generally doesn’t hold things up that much, and if it does your film is worth it, so who cares what everyone else thinks. If you want to speed things up, I would recommend putting everything in a gallon size ziplock bag which you just hand over.

And do not check your film. Checked bags go through multiple x-rays. 

Hope that helps :)