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Chernobyl Wallpapers
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 | decay, hdr, wallpapers | 4 Comments
The last few weeks have been very successful: The Chernobyl Journal was featured on a couple of high profile sites, notably Design You Trust, Neatorama, Cult Case, and radio host Kim Komando’s Cool Site of the Day. At one point the server broke down from an amazing 14 000 visitors on one day.
Among the loads of feedback I received, one request consistently came up: Wallpapers. You want wallpapers. So here you go: I’ve prepared 4 pictures in various wallpaper formats for your desktops. › Continue reading
Chernobyl Journal #13: End of the Rainbow
Saturday, July 4th, 2009 | decay, hdr, travel journal, video | No Comments
This is the last part of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.
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After that short excursion, it was five o’clock – time to leave. We went back to the bus, where Tanya had fun harassing Yuriy and the driver with feedback noises from the walkie-talkies:
Sound: Walkie Talkie Feedback Galore!
We picked up Laura and René (who had lost their way in Pripyat, but found back to the main street), and drove back to Chernobyl. The last location we visited before returning to the research station was the old shipyard north of Chernobyl. The rusty boats looked beautiful in the evening sunlight. It was hard to find a good spot to shoot them without having tree branches in the way, but it was a worthwhile location to visit at the end.
Chernobyl Journal #12: Fire & Militia Station
Friday, June 26th, 2009 | decay, hdr, project wormwood, travel journal | No Comments
This is part twelve of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.Wormwood category.
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Beat and I re-grouped at the van and took a break. A quick phone call to Laura and René revealed that they were still exploring Pripyat roofs, so we asked Yuriy if he could take us to the old fire station in the southwest for half an hour. The station was nothing special – a large hall for the (absent) fire trucks and some adjacent common rooms (one of them full of soft drink bottles).
On the other side of the road however was a much more interesting site: Pripyat’s old militia station, which was full of old vehicles: Cars, buses, trucks, dredgers, even a small tank BRDM-2D combat vehicle. There were further vehicles on top of the militia building, and I still have no idea how they got up there. I was initially worried that the radiation around those vehicles would be very high, as metal absorbs radioactivity better, but it wasn’t. This meant that they hadn’t been used during the accident, and all of those vehicles had been moved to the old junkyard at the border of the zone.
Photo Albums
Album: Fire Station
Album: Militia Station
Map for this Journal Entry
The Chernobyl Journal will conclude next week.
Chernobyl Journal #11: Music and Mirrors
Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | decay, gallery, hdr, project wormwood, sounds, travel journal, video | No Comments
This is part eleven of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.category.
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Leaving the docks, I went on to the cinema/theater complex to the north. In front of it must have been a large gathering area, probably with fountains, which was now a collection of concrete plates with yellow grass between them. On the side of the cinema, there was a large red-and-blue Soviet mosaic on the wall. Unfortunately, the lighting inside the cinema was almost absent, and I couldn’t get a good shot of the projection room (Beat has a picture of the room, I don’t know how long he had to expose in there!). Not surprisingly, its closed nature made the cinema one of the spots in Pripyat with the lowest radiation levels I had measured (<0.1 uSv/h, lower than my living room).
Chernobyl Journal #9: The Other School
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | decay, hdr, project wormwood, travel journal, video | No Comments
This is part nine of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.
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After wandering around the hospital for two hours, I went back to the van, where our InterInform colleagues were waiting (the driver was busy playing handheld video games). I discovered some radioactive hot spots in the moss before the clinic which Yuriy confirmed with his Geiger counter. He then offered to show us “school #1″, another large complex just opposite of the hospital. › Continue reading
Chernobyl Journal #8: Pripyat Hospital
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | decay, hdr, project wormwood, travel journal, video | No Comments
This is part eight of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.
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We spent most of the rest of the day in Pripyat’s north-east. The old Pripyat hospital was one of the biggest and most rewarding locations we visited. It consisted of five large buildings, about 6 stories high, all interconnected. The layout was rectangular so that one large corridor with rooms to each side lead through the whole length, flanked by two staircases at the side. In the middle of the buildings were open entrance areas, which seemed to have been used as common rooms or receptions. Almost every room was filled with medical equipment, from beds, cupboards, medicine bottles, autoclaves to whole operation rooms. › Continue reading
Chernobyl Journal #7: Reactor Island
Sunday, May 24th, 2009 | decay, hdr, project wormwood, travel journal | 2 Comments
This is part seven of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.
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On the next day we got up at about 07:30, got dressed and had breakfast at the agency. The meal consisted of two courses: First, a plate full of pickled vegetables (along with the same meat from the day before). Second, a big chicken leg with a huge serving of tasteless, overcooked rice, which made me feel like the protagonist in “Everything Is Illuminated”. Half an hour later, we drove off north again.
The first few hours of the day were reserved for the area around the nuclear reactor. The Chernobyl power plant consisted of 6 reactors, two of which were never finished building. Those two (reactors 5 and 6) were located on an artificial island east of the power plant. › Continue reading
Chernobyl Journal #5: Amusement Park, or: Why You Shouldn’t Wander Off Alone
Sunday, May 10th, 2009 | artists, decay, hdr, project wormwood, travel journal, video | 5 Comments
This is part five of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.
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Because of our group member’s different paces and interests, we were rarely at the same spot at the same time (which helped to keep people out of your pictures). At the Palace of Culture however, we all got together again. And while René and Laura were busy rising a new FC Pripyat from the ashes of the gym, and Beat was still looking for good spots to shoot, I got into a conversation with our guide who was standing in front of the van, waiting for us. › Continue reading
Project Wormwood: A Trip to Chernobyl
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 | decay, hdr, project wormwood, reviews, updates | 5 Comments
For almost two years, I have been planning a trip to one of the most deserted places on earth – deserted in the sense of “people have lived there and left”. The place is the city of Pryptiat near Chernobyl. And it is the most radioactively polluted spot on earth.
Google Maps: Chernobyl Reactor
“Chernobyl”, which is Ukrainian, means “Wormwood” in English. Wormwood is typically known for its bitter taste and it being one of the main ingredients of absinthe. It also bears a strange biblical references to a star which, in an apocalyptic vision of John the Evangelist, fell from the sky and made the waters undrinkably bitter.
“Project Wormwood” seemed a suitable name for this project. › Continue reading
New in the Gallery: Heavy Duty HDR
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | gallery, hdr | No Comments
I’ve finally come around to make use of the many bracketted shots I’ve taken with my new EOS 400D, to compose some heavy-duty HDR pics. Most of the recent pictures from the brewery and from India feature HDR processing with strong detail enhancement:
The pictures from the Indian mansion were taken on my recent trip to Calcutta – the purpose of this trip not being photography, but my wedding!
Check out the following photo sets for the whole collection:
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