PKR
Veteran
International travel with film isn’t dead it’s just more expensive like shooting film. Black and White sheet film tripled in price in 10 years. If I wanted to fly to New Mexico for 4 weeks of large format photography from Asia, the airfare, hotel, meals, car rental, film already cost $5000 or $6000. If I had to pay FedEx $350 to courier the exposed film home then in the bigger picture it’s doable. If I shot smaller format like with a roll film back the cost of shipping would be half that. The digital alternative to large format which would be a Phase One Acromat set up would run to US$50,000.
Just a note on Fed-X, and, I don't know if this applies to the current Fed-X business model.
For several years, I shipped exposed film stock out of state for analogue to digital processing. There was one lab I used with SOTA gear for this processing.
Fed-X was my primary shipper and, a large depot was close by. All Fed-X air shipments are X-Rayed. So, I shipped my film Ground. I found some ground shipments arriving very quickly. I asked about the quicker arrival times. I was told, if there is room on a flight for extra cargo ground shipments are added to the flight. In that case, ground shipments are X-Rayed.
I never saw any problem with any of the film I shipped and, there was a lot of it. But, this is several years back. I'm not current with what Fed-X is doing now.