Lets take a walk in the park and we'll be free.

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Tags:   abandoned asylum decay derelict hospital urban exploration urbex Otwock mazowieckie Polska PL HDR Pentax Art Poland Visualmanuscripts

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Stylized HDR photograph of the majestic ruin of the grain storage facility of the Modlin Fortress in Poland.

Construction of the grain storage for the Modlin Fortress started in 1832 and was completed in 1844. This beautiful neo-renaisssance building was designed by a renowned architect Jan jakub Gaya and is located on a narrow promontory between Vistula and Narew rivers. Oiginally designed as a storage facility could also be used in a defensive role.
Despite serious damage suffered in 1939 (and in post-war years when it was decided to demolish the building in order to recover building material) it is still a majestic site and a joy to look at.
What remains today is practically just a half of the original facility but it's still huge. Wide stairs lead from the gate straight down to the river where once barges unloaded their cargoes.

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Tags:   pentax art Pentax Art Poland urbex derelict abandoned ruin fortress military HDR yellow history Visualmanuscripts

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A story of “The Norm”.

A pile of stones and some barbed wire, still remembering the summer of 1941.
Construction of hundreds of pillboxes of the Molotov Line required huge amounts of stone. It was crushed and mixed with fresh concrete. The best one was coming from the Caucasus Mountains – a long and expensive journey. So, inevitably, local stones were used on a massive scale. But they did not come by themselves.
Soviets, as mad and ruthless as they were, were also very precise and rigorous people. Not content with herding thousands of civilians into forced labor zones, they also came up with a set of precise rules, or “norms”, regulating who, how much, when and how was supposed to contribute to the overall effort of “defence works”.
It was carefully planned and calculated how many stones each local farmer had to bring to the building site. You've got a horse? Two? If two, then you need to bring more. It was that simple. No horse? You will dig foundation trenches then or, better even, endless anti-tank ditches. There were norms stipulating how many cubic meters of earth one needs to remove and what is the distance that removed portion needs to be moved away.

I always go around those remote, small villages asking about anti-tank ditches. As huge as they had been, they are hard to find today, most eaten up by forests and cultivated fields. But every piece of information is precious when drawing the maps of those forgotten strongpoints. I'm always very careful not to overuse the technical and military jargon – these are mostly simple people I talk to. But most often than not I found myself disappointed that they did not understand what I was asking about. It's a simple thing – an anti-tank ditch – even the name implies it, hey, it;s just a damn, deep ditch, that's all about it!
And then, to my horror, the answers started to pop out like a devil from the box. Of course they knew what an anti-tank ditch was! I was simply asking a wrong question... They had a different word for an anti-tank ditch. The one they remembered from their fathers and grandfathers, the one which which was so feared as it was hated, the one so horrible it stuck in the minds of simple folk for generations.

The called it “the norm”.

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Tags:   abandoned bunker derelict fortification history Linia Mołotowa military Molotov Line pentax pillbox shelter Soviet urban exploration urbex WW2 бункер заброшенные podlaskie Polska PL decay Art Poland Visualmanuscripts

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Mysterious machine, once a monument to the industrial glory of a huge factory, now overgrown with grass and bushes - a silent witness to the hectic activity of bulldozers levelling the derelict plant.

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Tags:   abandoned art b&w black and white decay derelict dramatic factory fine art forgotten grain HDR lost machine monochrome old photography Poland sky stylized texture texturized urban exploration urbex Ursus Warsaw Warszawa mazowieckie Polska PL Pentax Pentax Art Visualmanuscripts

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It makes me laugh but for the type of look which I like most one does not need a DSLr at all. For anything close to landscapes I usually prefer slightly blurred (sometimes faded) vision and then still I like to add some subtle textures.
Here, while doing some #endomondo biking I took a happy snap with an ancient #Canon Digital Ixus 750 compact camera. It has a 7.1 MP sensor and is not very noisy at all. I usually carry it in my pocket when biking and when I'm too lazy to haul a DSLr.
It's nine years old now and makes surprisingly nice photos - I've seen them sold at around $15 these days (second hand).
Technically speaking, I still believe that for an accasional snap even a several year's old compact (a decent one) is still better that todays smartphones, mainly due to optics, but again - maybe a smartphone would do for just fine for the kind of look I was after.

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Tags:   lake Landscape paintography park Poland texture Warsaw Warszawa mazowieckie Polska Pentax Art PL vintage endomondo Canon Visualmanuscripts

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