In the summer of 2002 I went to Europe for the first time, spending a week in France and two weeks in Italy. This coincided with a something of a lull in my photographic pursuits at the time; I had been occupied with my first year at university, and phrases like "film scanner" and "cross processing" weren't yet a part of my lexicon. Before the trip, I decided to take my first serious stab at shooting color, and in particular shooting color slides. I bought a few rolls of what looked like the least controversial E6 film, threw them into my suitcase, and off I went. When I got back, I was saddened to find a roll missing, but quickly forgot about it amidst everything else that I'd shot, and the swirling mists of time would've swallowed it up forever except...
I used the same suitcase to go to Paris for two months this summer. This time, I was fanatically paranoid about my film. By now, my site was in full swing and I had a lot to lose. Following the advice of the TSA, I made sure not to pack it in my checked luggage and as a further step I had it hand-checked at every security checkpoint I came to, apologizing profusely to the many screeners who had to look into 30 individual plastic containers with latex gloves to make sure they really contained film. When I finally got back to the U.S., my film was unfogged because it had never even come close to a baggage machine or even the lower-powered machines they use when you walk to the gate at the airport, and I was happy.
A couple weeks after that, in disturbingly typical fashion for myself, I still hadn't fully unpacked my suitcase. My dad started to get after me about it because it was actually his suitcase and he needed it soon for a business trip, which is not an infrequent thing for him. So I started to go through it and fish out random coins and ticket stubs and things from the side pockets and was quite surprised to find... a roll of Kodak Ektrachrome 200, film that I could only remember buying once: summer of 2002.
Now at this point, I can't even count the number of times this sucker must have been irradiated by the machines. At least twice on the initial trip, plus about six during my recent trip, plus at least ten more thanks to my dad flying around with it over the two years between my trips. So maybe... twenty times? More? Who knows. Remember, this is also all after 9/11, when every knob and dial has been cranked up to 11 at airports all over the world.
I didn't have much hope for it. It was almost certainly dead, and it definitely didn't justify the $7 and a 10-minute drive downtown it would take to get it processed. So, it sat on my desk for a few more weeks until I was getting ready to go back down to school, and on a lark I decided to drop it off at the minilab next the campus bookstore while I got my books, opting to have it cross-processed C41 for a buck instead of the more expensive E6, figuring I was just throwing the money away anyway.
You've probably already guessed the ending to the story: IT WASN'T FOGGED AT ALL. It came out perfect, absolutely no problems or any evidence of irradiation. How? I have absolutely no idea. I'm still completely shocked. At first I thought maybe all that stuff about X-rays fogging film was an urban legend, but a quick look on the internet yields literally hundreds of stories about getting burned by those machines. In any case, I'm thinking about writing a letter to Kodak or something. It's too bad Ektrachrome 200 is such a boring film, except of course for its apparent invincibility against X-rays.
So, here's a sample shot from the roll, you can be the judge. Note that the weird colors and contrast are the result of cross-processing, and the white halos are due to the fact that it was raining in Venice and I was using a flash.
