More Old School Warsaw

I had time to kill before a morning meeting yesterday, so I strolled around Dolny Mokotów. The scene above instantly grabbed me as totally old school communist Warsaw - drably at odds with the new office blocks and Galeria Mokotów shopping mall just across the way (below). There's nothing here that would look out of place in 1978; the Trabant 601 with its white-on-black number plates, the metal bin painted pre-faded orange, drainpipe in pre-faded blue. When Eddie saw this pic he suggested that I try to replicate the effect of communist-era photography. He dug out an old album of Warsaw from 1968 (Warszawa Miasto i Ludzie) and we played around in Photoshop trying to tweak the pic so it matched the photos in the old album. To get that Orwochrom look, I increased saturation of yellows and cyans, and ran the picture through a grain filter. Really, I could have done with a period Praktica camera and Pancolar 50mm f1.9 lens.