by Nikos | November 14th, 2003 On the road it’s easy to burn through dozens of rolls in very little time. So, unless you’re out there only for a couple of weeks, sooner or later, the accumulating exposed film will be an issue. Besides taking up space in your backpack, there’s a risk of losing them, damaging them, or spoiling them by continuous exposure to extreme temperatures and humidity. Developing the films locally is rarely a good option. It’s hard enough to find a good lab at home, let alone some remote town in a developing country. Plus, the developed negatives are just as sensitive (if not more sensitive) as the exposed rolls. So what do you do? Today I will discuss a couple of practical solutions to secure your precious snapshots of unrepeatable moments.
Plan A: Send them home
This looks like an obvious solution. You buy one of those crush-safe packaging envelopes and post them back home. The problem is that you can’t always trust long haul postage services, so you can add a little twist to play it safe:
Mark the rolls you expose with incrementing numbers. Do that, the moment you take the roll out of the camera. Put the odd numbers in one envelope and the even ones in another. Post the two envelopes separately, ideally from different post offices or even different towns along your trip. This way, even if one envelope gets lost you still have half of the photos, and because these are chronologically alternated, it is less likely that you will have lost an entire chunk of your trip. Most probably you would have shot a couple of rolls on a particularly interesting place, so you will have at least something from each part of your trip.
If you’re going to be away for a very long time, long enough to worry that undeveloped film will get spoiled (usually it’s good to have film developed within a couple of months from the exposure date, or else you may get faded coulours and other artifacts) it may be a good idea to send the films to a friend or relative who has previously agreed to take them to a lab and get them developed as they come.
Plan B: Negative scans on CD
Most labs have negative scanners that can automatically save your developed negatives in high-resolution photo-cd. One disc can easily hold 200-300 shots at a very high resolution (good enough to print enlargements) and the cost to get one burned is probably less than getting the actual prints. The discs are readable in normal computer cd-drives, they are compact and they won’t be spoiled by time or weather. Then keep the cd, which is easy enough to carry along in your trip and mail the negatives back home. For extra security, get the cd copied for cheap at an internet cafe and send the cd copy back home along with the negatives.
In fact, scanning negatives and burning them on cd-rom is a very good practice for archival purposes, even when you’re not on the road.
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