Taken in Pripyat, november 09.

Such photographs always are a bit gloom, like you said. It's a rather typical mood / atmosphere you get at such places.

The third picture is rather cliché though. =x

It just me or do these photos have some pretty bad distortion to them?

Of course, but it's not a place you visit *that* often, so...


None intentional, at least. Was taken with a compact camera though, nothing expensive used.
The first pic was taken through the window of a van, which explains the green-ish colors.

dull pics lol

I understand that your intentions with these pictures were to show a sense of desolation, but underexposing them and messing with the white balance doesn't help. + to blacks and desaturation would be > imo.

I believe he just wanted to show what it looks like over there now 25 years later.


We learned quite a lot about the Chernobyl disaster in highschool probably because Sweden like many other European countries was affected by radioactive fallout. I saw pictures taken of some of the nearby cities ten years after the disaster and it was quite surreal and eerie. So are those cities still uninhabitable??
Well for those of you who have never heard of Chernobyl you may want to check out this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster


@Lorven - Is there still a huge junkyard full of unusable firetrucks, helicopters and other vehicles due to radioactive contamination?

This post was edited by Futurama on Apr 30 2010 02:04am

Spam lol

God, don't you just hate people who do that? At least type a whole sentence..

The first one is a bit dissapointing, I can see that there are building behind the city limit sign (?) and I would really have liked to see a photo of the sign and the entire town in the background, bleak and desolate.

Although the third one may be some what cliche it speaks about the incident, I mean come on, who cares if it still might be radioactive? Lets go ride the Farris wheel!!

nice pics, but its 24 years ago.

I doubt there are that many nearby cities that are uninhabitable, the area north west of Chernobyl wasn't all that populated other than with smaller villages and farms. Had the wind blown south it would have been much worse, Kiev is just two hours away by car.
As for the huge junkyard - yes, they still exist for the simple reason that noone wants to touch them unless it's really needed. All vehicles used in rescue operations are, afaik, abandoned to 'be taken care of later'. Worse is, that the whole city is a trash-/junkyard more or less, due to looting.

Can't say we learned anything about this in school though, even though Sweden was one of the major recievers of radioactive dust. We mostly read about ww2.

Anyway, as you say, my intent was never to show off my awesome photo skills, because I have none. I did no (intentional) mixing with white balance and saturation, I used the 'auto' setting on my camera because it's simple to use and gives decent results without spending minutes per shot or taking 5 test pics before deciding on a setting.
I just got lucky to visit a pretty uncommon, yet historical, place, and thought I'd share some pics.



The first pic was taken through the window of our minivan while we stopped at a checkpoint, unfortunately I couldn't get out to get a better view of anything. Little comfort though that you wouldn't see much of the town from there anyway. There are only a few houses at the city limit, then comes a long alley with trees, and maybe 500m later comes the town. The thing is that the city is extremely overgrown, looks more or less like a jungle with houses squeezed inbetween the trees.
The only area that is not overgrown is the main square, I guess the concrete did a better job shielding off sunlight there.

The third one is a very 'common' motive, but I couldn't leave without taking a picture of it. The ferris wheel was never used btw, it was supposed to have its grand opening in may 1986, but now noone even got to test ride it.
I would have preferred the bumper cars.