This panorama shows New Rustavi which lies half an hour south-east of Tbilisi in Georgia. Rustavi is an ancient settlement that dates to around 500-400 BC, but the new part was built in the 1940s by German POWs on the orders of that infamous Georgian Josef Stalin. This was done to provide housing to thousands upon thousands of workers used in the many iron and steelworks in and around Tbilisi. New Rustavi is dominated by wide avenues along which literally hundreds of more or less colourful brutalist Soviet-style apartment blocks stretch for kilometers. After the fall of the iron curtain things haven’t gone so well and the area is today very poor.
In the foreground is a place selling used cars. There are a few men kicking the tyres in the lower right-hand corner. Just around the corner is another used car lot, Autopapa which is a massive parking lot full of cars from all over the world (it is visible from very high up in the sky).
On the roads in and around Tbilisi there are both left-hand drive cars and right-hand drive cars. It's very weird but apparently a result of the fact that cars, and often cars which have had accidents, are sold to other, cheaper markets, such as Georgia to be repaired and soled anew. There are many vehicles with collision damages, many of which are adorned by for instance English, French, German and Dutch company, like small Dutch dry cleaners for instance.
I shot this picture with the sublime 80 Planar FE which was coupled with the Hasselblad 2XE converter to make exposure a point and shoot operation. It's on Kodak Ektar and the fine grain really helps with the details (here's the large scan which even shows billboards and signs in the far distance, in addition to all the number plates. It is easy to stitch a panorama in Photoshop. The key thing to do is to colour-balance the component images first, which is dead simple with the eye-dropper tool.
New Rustavi | Flickr