Over Jeziorki

Today is Corpus Christi, so a day off work. Most offices have shut for Thursday and Friday, including ours. Many people have taken the entire week off. Time for some work-life balance.

Above: A marsh harrier circling over the marshes at the end of ul. Trombity. To get this sequence of shots, I moved deep into the reeds to get closer to where the harrier was hovering. I must have disturbed a hare, no more than ten feet (3m) from me. There was a sudden and rapid movement of a large body away from me through the reeds, betrayed only by a rush of moving foliage. I could not see it at all.

Above: The gold-painted Boeing 737 of LOT Polish Airlines, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the end of communism. Full story here. And it's a story of hope. Here's a state owned company that has actually listened to a creative artist and done something inspired and unusual, rather than the normal reaction: "nie mam pomysłu, ale nie dam szansy komuś kto ma". Opinions as to the aesthetics of the colour scheme are divided within the spotters' community, but me, I like it. On the tail the words 'Wspólna Sprawa' (mistranslated on the other side as 'Common Task' rather than 'Common Cause'

A propos of which: the exhibition in the Polish Parliament marking the 20th anniversary - has anyone seen the English translations of the photo captions? Appalling! Has it not occurred to anyone to run them past a native speaker before expensively printing them?

"On the 3rd of May, 100 thousand Warsawers were showing their support for Solidarity outside the St. John's cathedral when the militia traditionally detained over a dozen of people". Ręce opadają.

Busy election Sunday

The day started with a visit to the Camera Fair at Stodoła (a shadow of what it once was, but still the best place in Warsaw to buy photographic kit). I went with fellow snapper and Nikon user, Bob, each of us armed with a shopping list of stuff needed and stuff wanted.

The battery memory issue detailed in earlier posts meant that a new EN-EL3a battery for my Nikon D80 was a priority. Another was a decent tripod head. Yesterday's B&W shoot convinced me of the need for something more flexible in the field than the two-way cine head attached to the top of my solid, sturdy and otherwise excellent Polish wooden tripod. The old head has a busted screw which means the platform's loose; the camera is at risk. Bob recommended a joystick-style grip which gives infinite control over the camera position. A Chinese-made one was available for 140 zł - very well made and rock-solid (and a lot cheaper than the $100 Bob paid for his!). Next up was a nearly-new secondhand bargain - a Nikon D40 with basic 18-55mm lens. A second back-up body is becoming a necessity, something light, cheap and reliable to ensure no missed shots due to lens changing or battery failure. And six times cheaper than my D80 and 18-200mm lens combo.

Next: Going to vote. Most important. Ensuring that Poland is represented in the European Parliament by people who are not going to make it a joke.

Above: to the ballot box at the school on ul. Sarabandy. Turnout was surprisingly high (less than 20% was forecast). Still, the Warsaw district of Ursynów always has always been among the best in Poland when it comes to voting. Photo taken on Nikon D40 with 18-55mm lens.

The European Parliament voting system encourages one to vote for the best known name on the list of candidates from the party you support. Voting for a less-well known one is the equivalent of voting for the party you don't support. Tactical voting in EP elections is something that Polish voters have yet to learn (and parties have yet to explain).

Exit polls suggest that the nutty parties (likely to sully Poland's reputation in Brussels) received one percent or less of the popular vote. So - a good result.

W-wa Jeziorki to Góra Kalwaria - by train

Railway lines disappear, services get axed, networks shrink. So it's wonderful to see new services emerging! This is the first weekend of trains between Warsaw and Góra Kalwaria via Czachówek, so I decided to see how it goes. The new service is operated by Koleje Mazowiecki, the suburban rail operator, which is 51% owned by the province of Mazowsze and 49% by PKP. Since its formation in 2004, it has generally improved services, rolling stock and cleanliness of stations.

Why not, said a clever member of the Board, why not re-build the railway station and run trains into Warsaw and back, so that local people can get to work and home again in less time? And so a plan was prepared and made public in January; at last, on last Monday 1 June, the first scheduled passenger-carrying service ran into Warsaw.

The idea is great - masses of commuters living in Góra Kalwaria, some 30km from the centre of Warsaw, spend three or four hours a day stuck in traffic jams on their way to and from work.

Czachówek Wschodni: quiet Saturday afternoon at the station
I'm mentioned Czachówek a few times; it is a railway junction some 10 miles/16km south of Jeziorki. It's noted for having a couple of hundred inhabitants and four railway stations. Two were out of use, though with the new rail service, Czachówek Wschodni has been re-opened. By swinging off the Warsaw-Radom line onto the Skierniewice-Łuków line using the north-to-east spur at Czachówek, a new transport possibility emerges.

The new route swings east at the railway junction
I took the train from W-wa Jeziorki which departed at 16:15 and arrived at Góra Kalwaria shortly before five. The train was turned around, and at 17:21 it set off for Warsaw, arriving back at W-wa Jeziorki just after six. My return ticket for the 50km round trip was... 6zł 70gr., a promotional price (the ticketing machines have not yet been set up to include Góra Kalwaria.

Góra Kalwaria: the train's longer than the platform. Days later, a shelter's been erected here.

With good promotion, the people of Góra Kalwaria will abandon their cars and the PKS buses in favour of the rail service. If it takes off, the local authorities will run more trains, which can only be a good thing. So fingers crossed.

On the timetable I noticed an interesting one-a-day service - Warsaw to Pilawa via Czachówek and Góra Kalwaria. Leaving W-wa Jeziorki at 18:55, it arrives in Pilawa, 50km away, across the Vistula, at five past eight. But what to do in Pilawa? The return train leaves Pilawa at 04:40 the following morning and arrives back at W-wa Jeziorki an hour and ten minutes later.

This time last year:
Fields turning into housing estates

Homage to Ansel Adams

As I pointed out a few posts back, April marked the 25th anniversary of the death of Ansel Adams, my favourite photographer. Today's walk was in his honour. Below: the Jeziorki wetlands, taken from the ul. Dumki side.

Whenever asked which camera he used, Adams would always reply, "the biggest I can carry." He tended to use the 10"x8" view camera, always on a tripod. The negative, some 60 times larger in surface area than a 35mm negative, yielded results of the highest possible quality.

Above: Silver birches on ul. Trombity. To ensure the pictures were in as sharp focus as possible, Adams would opt for fine-grain, low-sensitivity film, long exposures and small apertures. Which is what I aimed to do today. All these pictures were taken with the camera on my sturdy wooden tripod, exposures from 1/5th to 1/20th second at f22 to f25. ISO on the Nikon D80 only goes down to 100.

Above: Narrow potato field alongside ul. Nawłocka. I wonder what Ansel Adams would have made of digital photography; whether he would have adapted to it or stayed true to large format film. And if he'd made the jump - when. Would he have been satisfied with 10 megapixels?

Above: view from ul. Nawłocka looking towards ul. Trombity. Adams was a perfectionist. It's much easier perfecting images digitally than chemically!

The Nikon D80 offers the option of shooting in B&W. Why would anyone wish to do that? Well, one thing it can do is in-camera filtering. I had this set to 'red', which darkens blue skies and makes red objects (such as the poppies in the foreground) lighter.

Another time, another place

I'm being hit repeatedly in the course of one day by a string of flashbacks, each slightly different, yet each one eminently familiar in flavour, and consistent over the years.

What's going on? I await some neuroscientist to convince me that this is but a random firing of synapses in the hippocampus, or a flow of dopamine through the brain.

But it's too regular, too familiar; there's a pattern here that's clearly not random, a phenomenon that's above chance.

But what is it? Is this concrete proof that our souls live on after the deaths of our bodies in new bodies, acquiring consciousness with each successive incarnation?

Maybe.

I don't want to be dogmatic - because I simply don't know. Nice as it would be to construct a theology around this, I can only honestly say: "I don't know, but I want to know, and will strive my best to find out."

Is this my consciousness picking up signals from some other consciousness from another time and another place? Or from different universes, realities concurrent?

The key question is whether these anomalous flashbacks are also "I". If so, there is a succession of lives behind and ahead of us, a continuity of our own personalities. But maybe not.

I'm working away at the office, focused on what I'm writing, when BAM! out of nowhere, unbidden, not an idle daydream conjured up but an intrusive thought - and there it is; the exact feeling, simulacrum of reality, as though I were actually there, at Chiswick Open Air Swimming Pool, London W4 in the early 1960s. I'm sharing a can of cold Pepsi-Cola with Janet and Richard; I'm five, maybe six. I can picture the colours and shape of the cold, steel can, with those pre-ringpull pierced triangles. Memory so clear, so real, so intense - then PAF! it's gone, leaving just a pleasant afterglow.

OK neuroscientists - no trouble with that one then.

But when I get flashbacks of equal intensity and familiarity but yet not of this life - then start asking questions.

I'm crossing ul. Myśliwiecka this morning; the sky, clouds, air temperature, brim of my Trilby hat - BAM! Minnesota in the 1950s? Not from my life. Yet I experienced it in exactly the same way I experienced the swimming pool flashback.

I think this phenomenon is more common among mankind than is generally accepted. We ignore, deny, explain away. If we were all more open to it, maybe we could move ahead out of the straightjacket rationalist-reductionist worldview to a more spiritually open-minded one. Dozens of people I've talked to have had inklings (or much more!) of such possibilities. Deeply held interest in Ancient Greece, a fondness for India 'long ago', China in the 1920s, colonial East Africa, post-war USSR. We need to be open to the possibility that essentially we are in tune with a continuum of consciousness spanning many, many human lives.

This time last year:
Reflections on 1960s England
Reflections on rural Mazowsze from the air

Spirit of Place

"Sweet secret suburb on the City's rim"... "where city clerk can turn countryman again", "linked to the Metropolis by electric train." Yet again, Betjeman's words permeate my thoughts as I wander around Jeziorki, soaking in the the spirit of place.

What is it that bids me to seek out spirit of place (platzgeist in German, mirroring the word zeitgeist or 'spirit of time')?

[We can also use the Latin genius loci - thanks Marzena!]

And why am I so happy having found a specific spirit of place here in Jeziorki? Being in a place brings on spiritual contentment? Can one have a metaphysical attachment to place?

Pilgrimage, the journey to a place of cult or veneration, but why that particular place? What was it about the spirit of that place, its klimat, that determined that it should be a shrine, a place of pilgrimage? To what extent is the journey as important as the destination? The notion of topophilia is relevant.

There are places that have a peculiar magic about them; these can be urban, suburban or rural, mountains, coast or plains, but they differ from places that lack any atmosphere or klimat. Greenford or Hayes in Middlesex - ghastly places. Vast swathes of outer London - identical high streets, traffic, crowds, lacking in character.

But here in Jeziorki, I feel at home, I feel that this is where I am from. So close to the centre of a capital city, yet I can walk around for a hour without bumping into anyone else.

[D80 battery memory: 46 photos today, two occurrences of the battery telling me its dead.]

Update 2022: The spirit of place has gone; evaporated. An expressway thunders through these fields through which I used to roam. Time to move.

A long night in church

Moni had her confirmation last night at the Dominican abbey in Slużew. And quite some ceremony it was too, starting at eight in the evening and finishing well after 1 am.

She had been attending confirmation classes for the best part of two years; the lead up to the ceremony is not taken lightly (skip too many classes and you're name's off the list). Confirmation takes place on the eve of Pentecost and the sacrament is administered by a bishop.

Although the Dominican Abbey is a modern building, bereft of the built-up trappings of centuries - holy paintings, miraculous statues, etc, the Dominicans still know how to Put On A Show. To quote John Betjeman: "Church and Stage have always been closely connected". The music is staggeringly good at putting the congregation into a deeply spiritual mood (helped by first-rate accoustics), the ritual, steeped in symbolism, the incense, the vestments are traditional and As They Should Be, yet never have I heard a dodgy message from the pulpit (re: politics, the EU, Jews, masons, cyclists); sermons stick to Christ's Love. The congregation itself it is in good measure young (many students) and intellectuals. The first non-communist prime minister of modern Poland, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, worships here.

The sermon from Bishop Pikus, finished with the words "True human happiness is impossible without Belief"; words to ponder upon, an idea worth lengthy contemplation.

The picture above was taken with my Nikon D80 (the battery memory issue seems to have mysteriously cleared up!). I used my 105mm f1.8 Nikkor wide open (640 ISO at 1/40 sec). Being able to use my old Nikkor lenses is one reason why I chose to go digital with Nikon rather than Canon. Click to enlarge and see the detail.

If you are wondering why the shops are shut* today, it's because it's Pentecost and the nation is commemorating the Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles (Zielone Świątki in Poland, Whitsun in England).

* Last year, a radio journalist called a prominent PiS politician and mischievously asked him whether he was going shopping that day. Hearing the answer 'yes', the journalist told the politician that he couldn't. "And why's that?" asked the politician. "Because you lot voted to close all shops today", replied the journalist. Collapse of stout party.

My First Nikon D80 Problem

Two years, three months and over 25,000 exposures after buying my Nikon D80, a fault. A small, intermittent, easy-to-work-round fault, but a fault nonetheless.

After taking a photo, sometimes, the 'battery low' icon flashes in the viewfinder, and there's a black screen on the back of the camera. The LCD readout on the top of the camera confirms a dead battery. But it's just been charged! I switch the camera off, then back on - and everything's fine, battery meter confirms a 98% charge.

This can happen after one shot, after three, or ten, or four - a seemingly random fault.

It started happenening after a series of night time bulb exposures (catching lightning strikes) last week. Never happened before, now it's occurring at least once in every shooting session.

Annoying, because there's no rule to it, not a fault bad enough to have to take it in for immediate service, but still a fault and irritating.

Has anyone else had this problem with the D80? Is there a fix? (I've not attempted to do anything to isolate the cause of the fault such as swabbing the electrodes of the battery pack etc in case it does more damage).