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Protecting Unexposed Film from Cosmic Radiation?
iblink asks: "Last year Fujifilm stopped producing a color slide E-6 sheet film called Velvia 50. It has unique color characteristics that I love so I decided to purchase the remaining stocks in Europe. I now have hundreds of boxes that need to be stored for up to thirty years. A number of film experts assured me that freezing the Velvia would stabilize the dyes for long term use. However, they all mentioned that cosmic radiation would eventually fog the film, and they offered little help in finding a relatively inexpensive barrier. I found various ideas on proton cosmic radiation barriers — a big bucket of water, lead, certain plastics — but nothing convincing or sufficiently detailed (which plastic? How thick?). The film is currently in a freezer, unprotected. Any ideas?"
I prefer using a fantastic group of four astronauts to block cosmic radiation. It seems to work well.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Were any of the film experts from FujiFilm? They may have some guidance for you. As them how they store film stocks.
--Mike
You could use a very deep cave or mine, however this then presents other radioactive issues.
Have you a unused mine shaft nearby, pop the fridge down there and that will help. The deeper the better.
I am not an expert on such matters, but would a faraday cage prove useful? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage "To a large degree, Faraday cages also shield the interior from external electromagnetic radiation if the conductor is thick enough and any holes are significantly smaller than the radiation's wavelength. This application of Faraday cages is explained under electromagnetic shielding."
I note that it's now past late spring 2007.
Why not make a huge tin foil hat to sit over all your boxes? Jokes aside, I wish you luck. When Agfa APX 120 was no longer made I too dreamed of stocking up, but costs sorta got in the way. I hope you find an easy, long-lasting solution.
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I think that I should warn you that everything eventually decays. Nothing lasts forever. And film, just like fruit, is best served fresh. If you really want to continue using Velvia in, say 600 years, I would recommend that you try to come up with some way of getting it fresh in the future. Just because Fuji stopped producing it, shouldn't mean that they won't be able to produce a small batch of it (at ridiculous high prices) if you make a special order. A different option, is to simply ask for the "recipe" (possibly by signing an NDA or similar contract), and get an independent laboratory to produce it when you need it. The last (and the only sane) option, is to try to find something else that fits your need. Such as analysing sample pictures, and coming up with a photoshop color filter that does the same thing.
Forget about Velvia 50 & just move onto Velvia 100F like the rest of us have. 50 has little to no (most people would say the latter) advantage over 100f.
If they bring it back with "substitute raw materials and new manufacturing technologies ," it won't be the same thing. Emulsions and our attachments to them are delicate things. Any change, however subtle, will kill the effect. The new film may be just fine. It may be sort of like the old film. But it won't be the same.
Think "New Coke." It was supposed to be the same, wasn't it? In fact, some bottlers changed formulas and put New Coke in remaining stocks of old cans. The first time I tried one of those, I literally did a spit take. It might have been a perfectly fine soda, but it was different. It wasn't what I expected and I could tell that a change had been made.
The human senses are far more sensitive than people realize. New Coke didn't fool me. A change in materials in a film emulsion won't fool they eye of a photographer who loved the old formula.
Now I'm going to go do some research to help this guy. He really does need to arrange good long term storage for his film.
If you are concerned about being able to use Velvia film in the long term, it might be easier and cheaper to get together with other like-minded folk and find a cheap contracting manufacturer somewhere like China or India who can copy the Velvia manufacturing process (if they bother follow licensing protocols...) to provide a supply of fresh film.
Obviously, there's a problem, know-nothing slashdot smartmouths be damned. Here's what Kodak says:
The cosmic radiation in question has enough energy to travel across the galaxy, blast through several kilometres of atmosphere, penetrate your building's roof and walls and then punch through the box holding your film before actually interacting with the film. Seems unlikely that you'll be able to do much more to keep the film fresh.
I've heard that if you stack a bunch of red Fiestaware dinner plates, and then store your film sandwiched in layers between them, then cosmic radiation won't be an issue at all.
Did you also happen to buy and store a 30-years-worth supply of chemicals (and a processing machine) for E-6?
this just came to my mind:
you can try to protect with some kind of magnetic shield, to maybe trap these evil particles in some kind of "magnetic swirl" or like that....
hummm, but fast spining particles will radiate any way....
and probably you will need a lot of power (i mean $$$$) to produce a strong enought "force field"
well, just a few ideas.
Like lots of photo buffs, the first thing I thought of was the Rochester Institute. And that led me to an answer.
I'm not going to put directly on Slashdot the name and phone number of a real person. However, if you visit the Image Permanence Institute web site and poke around, you'll find a name and phone number you can call to get in touch with an expert on these subjects who will either know the answer or know where to find it.
You may want to investigate "Graded-Z shielding". The name comes from the fact that it uses layers of shielding with decreasing atomic numbers. You might first have a layer of lead, then a layer of tin, then one of copper. The lead stops the cosmic rays (protons, electrons, light atomic nuclei), but generates X-rays in the process. These X-rays might also fog your film. The X-rays produced as the lead absorbs the cosmic rays have a characteristic energy (88keV) which is not well absorbed by the lead itself - that's where the tin comes in. Again, the tin stopping the X-rays from the lead generates X-rays with a lower characteristic energy (29keV, which is in medical X-ray energy territory), which it doesn't absorb too well. The copper absorbs the X-rays from the tin and again emits X-rays with a yet lower characteristic energy. I don't know if the 9keV X-rays produced by the copper are a problem for Velvia. If they are, you'll need a yet lighter layer; a glance at the periodic table shows aluminium is a likely candidate.
I have no idea about the sensitivity of Velvia to cosmic rays or X-rays, so can't suggest thickness of the materials. My wild-ass-guess is somewhere in the 10s of mm. 30 years is a hell of a long time though. There are companies which specialise in shielding of this type (search for 'radiation shielding', 'graded-z shielding' and the like), they may be able to provide advice and sell you enclosures.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
I found no study on the effect of cosmic radiations on film, but there are many about their effect on electronic components. I am going to assume that a radiation hit that is detrimental to components is detrimental to film.
n .pdf.
IBM did a study, long ago, on the effect of background radiation and cosmic rays on electronic component reliability. They found that high-altitude places such as Denver, Co. were getting an order of magnitude more Single Event Upsets (that is, one solar/cosmic ionizing particle trickling into a CMOS circuit) than sea-level locations. They also found that the atmosphere was en efficient shield and that most of what remained at sea level was Nth-generation particles from a cascade of events triggered by the initial high-energy protons. See http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/401/ogorma
Best practice is to shield machines in 50 cm (20 in) of concrete. They noted that 3 floors of concrete buildings offered sufficient protection.
Caveat about some materials (especially ceramics) that contain radionucleides.
Bottom line, put your films in a radon-free basement, and since they chemically decay, put them in as low a temp as they can withstand.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
Q: My film is being destroyed by cosmic death rays, what can I do about it?
A: Digital camera, Raid 5, good backups.
Q: But only velvet#50 has the unique qualities I'm looking for. I can't reproduce that with digital.
A: Photoshop CS7, Filters -> Artistic -> Velvitize.
Q: But I have to have REAL velvet#50 for all these Elvis and Bengal tiger prints I'm doing. I can't print on velvet with an inkjet!
A: I heard fujifilm has a good film that does this, see if they still make it.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
About 20 years ago I had a small surplus stock of Kodak E6 professional transparency film left over at the end of a project. The storage recommendations from Kodak were to store E6 cold and dry, so I bagged and sealed the films and put them in low-humidity cold storage. As an experiment I left the films there. The films developed ok at 8 years age with excellent quality, and again at 15 years age, but by then slight fogging was visible. Maybe the fogging was due to cosmic rays, or perhaps the photochemicals had degraded. Anyway, the experiment ended when the E6 processing lab I used to use closed down (soon followed by its rival firms). I kinda miss E6. Really excellent true color reproduction and high resolving power (IIRC, over 100lines/mm).
I would think Priority 1 would be to protect it from environmental hazards - humidity, flooding, etc - With hundreds of boxes of the stuff, I would imagine you'd need a "vault" not unlike the buried '57 Belvedere recently unearthed in Tulsa, OK - http://www.buriedcar.com/ , but hopefully without the whole "3 feet of water" syndrome, leaving the already rust-prone vehicle completely worthless to anyone but a museum of oddities. Best of luck to you, keeping anything hermetically sealed off but still accessible over the course of even 5 years is a problem that NARA has been throwing millions of dollars at, without coming up with a solution that can scale up _and_ down...
I find my tin hat very useful to protect my brain from cosmic radiations! I don't see why you couldn't use it for your film.
Keep film fresh for 30 years seems to be a tough nut to crack, but the question I ask is: what sort of camera/lens do you expect to be shooting in 30 years?
Electronics die. And there are very few cameras produced today that do not have any electronics in them.
So rather than considering just the film issue, you have to consider the overall package for the next 30 years, and that includes:
1/ Film storage
2/ Camera oeration and maintenace
3/ Developement chemicals
If anyone of these 3 fails you in the future, then the other 2 won't be able to do their job.
I would also question your deisre to store this film for so long. To me it seems you are obsessed with the film itself, rather than the images you are producing.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
ISO 50 film is not very sensitive, and I suspect that over 30 years even cosmic ray exposure won't cause much fogging.
The original poster is asking about sheet film, not 35mm film, so we should assume they are using at least a 4"x5" camera for high-end work, not taking snapshots of aunt Millie's poodle.
Switching to digital is *not* an option for most people in his situation. Digital SLRs, while I love them and use them every day, suck in comparison to medium or large format. In oversimplified terms, to prevent moire patterns from showing up they need to "blur" the image and re-sharpen it in software, and you can never achieve the kind of sharpness you get with larger-than-35mm with anything but the $7,000 16MP Canon 1DSMkII. There are digital backs for medium format cameras in the 22-35MP range, but they cost tens of thousands of dollars and are fairly clunky. Digital scanning backs for large format cameras are similarly out of reach for most photographers, and are incredibly annoying to use in the field as they have to be tethered to a laptop. Also, since they slowly scan across the film plane, anything moving in the frame will show up either distorted or as a series of jagged broken lines.
Because of the many, many limitations of the Bayer pattern sensors on digital cameras and the significantly different way that these sensors handle color and dynamic range, film still outperforms them in medium and large format photography. Please stop telling the OP to abandon film and jump to digital, there are still perfectly legitimate reasons to be shooting film, especially if you're a pro.
That said, you're probably going to have a real hard time keeping that film and will have to bite the bullet like the rest of us and jump to the Velvia 100-F like the other poster said. Even without the radiation problem, even frozen film will chemically deteriorate over time. Shoot your stock fast and give the 100-F a try.
As a last resort, scanning your sheet film with a good transparency scanner and manipulating the curves in Photoshop can get you pretty far, but scanners don't have the Dmax to really make a faithful reproduction. Also, you will need to learn a lot about digital color management to get anywhere close. You'll loose some out-of-gammut colors, some shadow detail, and some highlights, but you may be able to get the overall image to look closer to your expectations.
Best of luck.
You forget that the dyes, gelatin, etc. all contain some percentage of radionucleides. So cosmic ray shielding (assuming that you don't end up with a radioactive cosmic ray shield) will help somewhat, but is only going to forestal the inevitable.
On the bright side, at least you get some number of years before it goes bad.
The part that I'm really pissed off about is that Koadk Ektachrome IR has been discontinued and there's nothing remotely like it... unlike with Velvia where Velvia 100 non-F is actually a quite decent film.
Gentoo Sucks
If you built a Faraday cage around your fridge, that might work. IANA physicist, so I'd ask one before spending a boat load on copper mesh. But THEY use it to protect radio telescopes from EM interference from their computers...
You'd just need to make sure the mesh holes are super tiny, because, as you know, cosmic radiation has an EXTREMELY short wavelength. Then again, if you ground the fridge, it might work on its own...just make sure you've got some kind of conductive sheath over the gaskets on the doors that is electrically connected to the fridge.
Neutrino detection experiments are typically housed in mines maybe two miles underground in order to prevent cosmic rays from interfering. Perhaps one could pay the experiment sponsors enough to store the film there, maintain freezing temperatures by using their electricity source (a bit more difficult as the ambient temperature is higher that deep underground), and surround the freezer with a barrier to any nearby radioactive sources. Maybe you have a cousin involved in such a project!
The incidence of cosmic particles is related to their energy - higher energy particles are rarer (and harder to stop). Consider a shielding strategy short of a deep salt mine but don't stack the film so that an incoming particle blasts through the entire batch. You can test a stack by developing the top sheet of a short stack. Put a sheet of something you care less about on top. Can you find several freezers in isolated spots in the bottom levels of basement parking garages?
Lead. I mean, it protects Superman from kryptonite, doesn't it?
It's counterintuitive, but shielding can actually make more radiation. The problem is that when a high energy cosmic ray strikes a nucleus, it can make a whole bunch of secondary particles which still have a lot of energy. Then those particles interact again, and so on, producing a "shower" of particles that can interact with your film. Sensitive neutrino experiments go far under the earth's surface to avoid cosmic rays, and even there they get a fair number of (low interacting) muons. I helped test a large space astronomy observatory and we regularly got blatted by cosmic ray showers, even though the observatory was inside a pressure vessel with thick steel walls. Proper shielding is an art.
Burying your film underground may make things worse too... if you live in an area rich in radioactive soil or radon gas. Building materials like concrete can often also be contaminated with uranium.
. . . it's where I stick things when I don't want the sun shining on them.
Velvia 100F is crap. Velvia 100 (not 100F) is the way to go if you want the Velvia look, and you should expose it at ISO 80. I prefer Provia though.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
You have different label law than we do.
Cane sugar is sucrose.
Corn sugar is naturally glucose, but there is a chemical process that can turn half of the glucose into fructose.
I'm surprised you're not getting sucrose up in Canada. WTF?
1. the $7,000 16MP Canon 1DSMkII
2. digital backs for medium format cameras in the 22-35MP range
Cost? Compared to buying and storing pricy film for 30 years, I think the answer is obvious.
In 5 years we'll have disposible 16MP cameras and the pro cameras will be 100MP.
Mass a lot of Mass.
But then you are just as likely to have radio active isotopes in that shielding mass that may or may not cause a problem.
The really big question is if this just a myth or not. Yes radiation will fog film but is this film that sensitive and is your 30 year time frame long enough to make a difference?
My best suggestion and it really is off the top of my head is put your freezer in a well ventilated basement. You could put some lead and polyethylene sheets around it just to be sure and best of all put a water bed on the floor above it.
Then you have the problem of secondary particles. Very high energy cosmic rays will hit your shielding and then cause a reaction like spaling. The one very high energy particle will create many lower but still energetic particles. You could also use some really big rare earth magnets to setup a magnetic field that will deflect a few particles.
The simple answer is you will never shield it from all radiation but frankly just sticking it in the freezer may be good enough.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I presume they would've had shielding in place for early missions into space where photographic film was used?
You can accomplish this in the same sort of way that high energy reactors are operated. You need to generate a magnetic containment field WITHIN a magnetic containment field... this will create a sort of magnetic DMZ where internally released and externally acquired particle and wave radiation will be forced to sequester and then be funelled as it were along an axis which you should orient into an absorbative material such as a carbon matrix.
...prolly at a very high rate, ghz at least I would think... This all would be prohibitively expensive of course...
The caveat is that the magnetic fields must be dynamic in roder for this to work and the polarity would have to be shifted
> However, they all mentioned that cosmic radiation would eventually fog the film...
No. Background radiation will eventually fog the film.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
[Visible] light shines through your walls and roof?
I think you might need to insulate a little more.
Isn't your freezer made out of metal?
I only posted to try and shut up the folks who were belittling the question. Eventually, I found real progress toward an answer here. I hope those folks can help you.
I think you're asking the wrong question: You should be trying to identify what it is about the color characteristics of this film you like and paying someone to develop a photoshop/gimp filter that does it with digital images.
I'd be surprised if you will even want to use this film in 30 years, when every phone in the world will be taking 3D holographic video that can be played back directly into your brain.
*sigh* Yes... I know it will be used mostly for porn.
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