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.

Tags: Chernobyl, decay, hdr, photography, Pripyat, urban exploration, urbanexploration

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).

› Continue reading

Tags: Chernobyl, hdr, photography, Pripyat, travel, urban exploration, urbanexploration

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

Tags: abandonments, Chernobyl, hdr, photography, Pripyat, travel, urbanexploration

Chernobyl Journal #6: Pool & School

Monday, May 18th, 2009 | decay, project wormwood, travel journal, video | No Comments

This is part six 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 waited for half an hour for Yuriy to come back – he had gone to the security perimeter to report the looters – until we took up Tanya’s offer of quickly going to “school #2″. The school, one of Pripyat’s seven schools, was supposed to be south of Lenin square. We followed her through the woods around old apartment blocks, came across an old electronics store with lots of old TVs, but didn’t find the school. › Continue reading

Tags: abandonments, Chernobyl, hdr, photography, Pripyat, urban exploration, urbanexploration, urbex

New Photo Set: Autumn Leaves

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 | decay, gallery | 1 Comment

Photo Set: "Autumn Leaves"

Some months ago, my friend and fellow photographer Annie Bertram recommended to me to visit the  historic automobile cemetery Gürbetal near Bern. The area was originally planned as an open air museum for vintage cars from the 1940s – 1970s, but the owners (who dealt in used car parts) never realized the project. So, the car collection became a car cemetery under birch trees, which was recently used for a national art exhibition. Unfortunately, the area is now closed for environmental reasons, and its future uncertain.

My wife and I visited the cemetery in October, one day before it closed. It was an amazing autumn day, and birch leaves were covering the cars under the trees. I’m happy to present to you a photo sets called “Autumn Leaves” – it contains 34 color and 20 black & white pictures.

Tags: abandonments, art, autumn, cars, decay, fall, hdr, openair, photography, rust, urbanexploration, urbex, vintagecars