In April I shot 20 rolls of film. I didn't know this number until I checked my scanning folder just now. 20 is actually crazy. March too is about 20. May I shot 17. Wtf. 

Well, without even knowing the actual number, I could feel that developing rolls one-by-one in the Ars-Imago lab box was pissing me off and not giving me regular results. Also, loading 120 in the lab box ends in sadness about 50% of the time and I really wanted to use my Mamiya 6 more.

So in early April, I decided to invest in an AGO with a 3-reel patterson tank. 

The AGO is the single best investment I've made in anything ever. It automatically manages the development time based on the temperature of the chemicals in the tank, so you always get a nice development. It cost me ~350 + import fees swiss francs, but I can now develop three rolls in 20 minutes start to finish.

The worst thing about this setup is loading the tank. You need to do it in a dark bag, which you eventually get used to, but it requires guiding the film onto these film reels and then advancing it until its fully loaded. The paterson reels have these microscopic tabs that I guess are supposed to help you do that? But they are hard to load with 35mm, and impossible to load with 120. I managed 120 twice after a lot of swearing. I've now switched to AP reels which are basically the same thing but with wide tabs and it hasn't been a problem since. 

Monte Boglia

The first victim of my new developing setup would be some ultramax shot in Ticino. My Australian friend from my exchange semester in Stockholm was visiting, and I figured Matt could use another Australian to talk to, so we took the train down to Lugano where it was thawed enough to hike and did the loop up to Monte Boglia. I thought talking about the housing market was just a Matt thing, but they talked about Melbourne real estate for about 4 hours so I guess it's a common fixation amongst all Australians. My bad.

As you can probably tell, I flashed the ultramax while loading it because it got jammed on the spool and I pulled my hands out of the dark bag. That let a small amount of light through one of the arm holes of the dark bag, which cooked a few frames and made the ultramax extremely hard to scan. Sad!

XP2XPan

The third roll in the first batch out of the AGO was some Ilford XP2 I had put in the XPan on a walk up Uetliberg. I did not expect to like XP2 so much, but it's the only chromogenic black and white film (can be developed with color chemicals) currently available, so I figured I should give it a try if it's easy to batch develop with my other color rolls. I think it's hot af, but it is expensive to shoot and dev compared to traditional black and white film. 

Hoher Kasten

Ok remember: it's April.

But I checked the webcams and Hoher Kasten looked relatively clear due to a very hot April. Matt and I agreed to try hiking from Hoher Kasten to Säxer Lucke and give up if we ever thought we were gonna die.

Well. It turns out most of the hike is on the shady side of the ridge, which I did remember but did not anticipate how much that mattered. I shot some Wolfen NC500 and Ektar in my M7 with the Summaron.

Sigh. Yeah my M7 started jamming again. I did manage to get this fixed eventually, but not the shutter capping issue, which you can see in the upper right corner of some of the frames and in these weird darker lines across the sky. My M7 is currently in repair for the 3rd time this year trying to get that resolved.

I abandoned the roll of nc500 early and swapped it out for ektar, which my M7 let me shoot the whole roll of without jamming.

We did make it to Stauben but had to head down there, as the conditions were too bad to continue.

Bonus content: Foma Ortho

I've recently switched away from using Df96 as my black and white developer (which is going great so far) but here are some Foma Ortho snaps around Zurich, developed with my last bottle of Df96. I think I was trying out using the AGO for black and white development.

Fürenalp

Did the Furenalp -> Blackenalp loop with Matt and Tim. God I love Portra 800. Forgive me. Some XPan and some Contax T3.

The idea was to see how far we could go up Surenenpass but the snow got quite deep at Blackenalp so we just turned around.

Swiss Film Club photo walk: Bern

Lennox, Raul, and Dani came with me to do a photo walk with the Swiss Film Club. I tried using the 21mm lens with the Contax G2. Not sure 21mm is for me, but it was fun to try!

We then met up with Alec for some dinner and walked around the city. I shot my last roll of XP2

Leica M2

The shop I dropped my M7 off at had several very beautiful Leica M2s for sale. The cheapest one had been fully CLAd and was from the brief era where M2s did not have self timers. Feeling M7-less and wanting a hold-over M body, I couldn't say no:

I've shot a few test rolls with it to see if I'm any good at metering by eye, but honestly haven't used it a ton until recently (July). Here are some shots from those test rolls:

Fun month! Next up, May.