Sunday 11 December 2011

Take Me Back To Tulsa

A house on ul. Karczunkowska, just around the corner from ours, has been abandoned and put up for sale with planning permission to use the plot for a warehouse or similar. The old-school Americana look of this building has given me an excuse to use Pixlr-o-matic, a software tool (available free and online here) that allows you to give your pics no end of nostalgic photo effects.

Above: looking like a 6x9cm transparency from my old Zeiss Ikon Ikonta C... (a great landscape camera with a 105mm f3.5 Tessar lens). Now I can do this with a Nikon D40 - anyone want to buy the Ikonta?

Above: looking like an Kodak Ektacolor 35mm print developed somewhere in the mid-1950s.

I have a feeling I shall be revisiting Pixlr.com again to give a dab of nostalgia to those pics from Jeziorki and district that give that makes me think "this is not America - No?"

The interesting thing about the plot of land offered for sale is its dimensions: 16.5m (53 ft) wide street frontage by 235m (775 ft) deep. [See it here on Google Earth: 52° 6'38.30"N 21° 0'34.78"E] Typical of the strip-farms in Mazowsze, this is result of not having primogeniture enshrined in Polish law. Rather than passing the entire estate to the oldest son, British-style, Poles would pare down their landholdings into ever thinner strips so that each son could get a fair share. The result can be seen from the air; rather than a patchwork of regular, rectangular fields that is most of western Europe, Poland has thin strips running across the landscape (see this post here).

This time two years ago:
Another book launch

This time three years ago:
Jeziorki in the 16th Century

This time four years ago:
Rotten weather, literally

2 comments:

adthelad said...

@MD
Revisited your strip farm posting and noticed the comments section had you remarking on a tvn interview you gave and on 'to' euro. I await your post on the Eusrozone's difficulties with baited breath - although I too am following developments as the repercussions of the UK's 'veto'. Barroso is saying this minute that the UK gave no room for manoeuvre. The resulting fiscal pact outside the existing EU treaties will affect the 27 and it's here that a further reason for Euro failure is portended. I found these interactive links somewhat illuminating : http://tinyurl.com/3dwm5lv for EU Debt crisis and http://tinyurl.com/co6v83s
for Credit crisis 'explained'.

Likes the photos by the way :)

adthelad said...

i mean bated breath of course.