So this might be a Swiss roll with a little Italian dessert on the side. I had thought that it might be near Lugano, but it seems that similar steamers are still used today on Lake Como in Italy. I have been trying to identify one of the lakes from the steamer shown above and below The picture contains a number of the large late 1940s American cars which were used as taxis in Zurich during the early 1950s Swiss sceneryĪs well as Zurich, the 20 or so viewable negatives show scenery in the Swiss mountains and around the lakes. There was an earlier photo, damaged by light leaks, on the film roll which showed the same car parked on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. The second photo of the same car on the right below gave an exact location at La Veduta on the Julier Pass in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. The registration number (AB 52 3287) is more than likely from the American occupation zone in Bavaria, which was current between 19. The first negative which I scanned was the one showing a mid-1930s BMW convertible (possibly a 303, 309 or a 315-I am sure that car experts will figure it out¹) on a snowy mountain pass. There were some light leaks on the first few frames where I, and possibly others, had opened the cassette without realising that there was a film inside. Not only had the photographer failed to develop the roll, but they also didn’t even manage to finish the course. The developed roll had 22 exposed frames out of 36, of which about 20 are usable. This involved agitating it for 15 seconds every minute over the hour-which I did while sitting down and munching on Blueberry muffins (the essential ingredient). Having discussed the issues with Mella Travers at The Darkroom in Dublin, we decided to give the roll a one-hour stand process with a diluted developer. Such old film often loses sensitivity if it has been lying around for a long time. Since the film had been bulk loaded into the FILCA cassette, there is no indication of film speed as the film edge just says “Perutz”. Comparable modern ISOs could be around double those numbers because older films had a ‘one-stop safety factor’. A new version, rated at 40 ASA was introduced in 1951. It was Perutz film of unknown type but, typically, Perutz black and white film of that era was rated at between 21 and 26 Scheiner (one here for the aficionados) or between 10 and 32 ASA. I had known that there was a film in the cassette for some time, but it was only recently that I got around to processing it. It came to me about five or six years ago with one of my vintage Leicas, of which more anon. The film had travelled around in a brass Leica FILCA cassette, from owner to owner through the decades.
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