Common Sense and Whiskey

It's Ukraine. Ukraine, I tell you.

One More Look at Pripyat and Chernobyl - A Dozen Photos

Photos from a March visit to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine. Click 'em to make 'em bigger. More photos here.

Kindergarten inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, near Chernobyl, Ukraine.


The lobby of the Palace of Culture, Pripyat, Ukraine, inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.


School inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

School inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

Inside the 30 kilometer Chernobyl exclusion zone, Pripyat, Ukraine - HDR.

The Supermarket on Lenin Street, on the central square, inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

The gymnasium at the Palace of Culture, inside the 30 kilometer Chernobyl exclusion zone, Pripyat, Ukraine - HDR.

That's Chernobyl reactor 4, the ruined one, on the right. The New Safe Containment is the structure under construction on the left. It's an arch (as you can see through the trees) which will be jacked up in the air on legs one section at a time, until it's tall enough to slide on tracks over to the right to cover reactor 4. This photo from March, 2013.

The amusement park at Pripyat, Ukraine, inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Kitchen inside the 30 kilometer Chernobyl exclusion zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

Inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

Chernobyl, Kyiv & Istanbul - Wednesday HDRs

Now that spring has arrived here in the southeast U.S., Chernobyl looks like a cold and forbidding place.  It was a cold and forbidding place, matter of fact.

Here are a few HDR photos from last month's travel. Click them to make them bigger. There are 35 photos posted so far to this gallery at EarthPhotos.com. One or two more go up most days.

First is the gymnasium at the Palace of Culture in Pripyat, Ukraine. Pripyat was the town built specifically to service the Chernobyl nuclear power complex. At the time it was evacuated, it held some 45,000 scientists, engineers and their families. The average age was just 26.

-----

Same building, just on the central square, along with a supermarket, government buildings, a restaurant and a hotel. The rug says "CCCP 60," to commemorate the USSR's 60th anniversary, which was a little over three years before the accident.

-----

The Great Patriotic War Museum in Kyiv is just about all in Ukrainian, with just little laminated cards to read in English, but much of the story being told is visual, anyway. The lands between Berlin and Moscow had it tough. They were flattened from one direction by the Germans, then from the other by the Russians. This monument is in an underground walkway outside the museum.

-----

There's a restaurant atop the Legacy Ottoman Hotel, just above the Eminonu ferries, with this fine view of the Golden Horn. Arrive about 5:00, as we did, and you have the whole place to yourself.

-----

There's a warren of alleyways between the indoor part of the Grand Bazaar and the waterfront. Here, men line up for a little work. Somebody dropped off there bundles of merchandise, and these guys are carrying them who knows where.

Chernobyl, Istanbul, Kyiv, London

London, Istanbul, Kyiv and Chernobyl. 25 pictures so far. Click here. Then under 'styles,' click 'slideshow.' Make 'em as big as you can.

One or two more most days, right through April.

Wednesday HDRs - London, Istanbul & Kyiv

The three cities (besides Chernobyl) that we visited earlier this month. Everybody takes this tourist picture of London, so I decided to do something else with it - first tonemap it and then make it up to look like an oil painting. Man, it was cold that day.

Sometimes I think there is no city greater than Istanbul. Here's the Haggia Sophia at twilight.

And this is St. Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv. (Kyiv is the Ukrainian language spelling. Kiev is Russian.) Kyiv is full of cathedrals. There are several more waiting on my hard drive.

Click 'em to make them bigger. There's a new photo or two a day from this most recent trip showing up here at EarthPhotos.com and here, more slowly, on Flickr.

St. Michael's Cathedral, Kyiv, Ukraine HDR

Haydarpasha Train Station, Istanbul

Just a quick first photo now that we're back and I can edit on the big screens at home. This is the Haydarpasha train station on the Asian side of the Bosphorus in Istanbul. Click it to make it bigger. Photomatix, Photoshop, and the texture is a shot taken in Chernobyl, from which lots more is to come.


More in the Turkey and HDR Galleries at EarthPhotos.com.

Snapshots, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

Yesterday we arranged a visit to Chernobyl, about 110 kilometers north of Kyiv. You must have a permit to travel inside the 30 kilometer "exclusion zone" around reactor number 4. Here are a few first photos. Starting with the second one, they're all from inside the exculsion zone.

Click through for more.

Snapshots

Wednesday HDRs from Peru

Here's Miraflores Beach in Lima, Peru:

It's not all that beautiful, really, and this time of year it's almost always overcast. Zoom in on the shoreline down there though, and you get abstract art:

More HDRs here. Here's one more HDR while we're here, an empty city street in the San Isidro district of Lima:

Processed in Photomatix and Photoshop.

 

More Moais - Three Last Wednesday HDRs from Easter Island

Three more fancied-up moais from Easter Island:

Top, the quarry at Rano Raraku, where these guys were carved out. It's a long way and a lot of effort to finally stand in this quarry, but if you ever make the trip, it feels like pretty much no other place. Too many mysteries. How did they move these guys all over the island with no modern tools? Why did they stop as if in mid-hammer blow, put down their things and walk away, leaving dozens and dozens of these guys at the quarry? And what happened to cause the downfall of Rapa Nui in the first place?

Middle, This is one lone guy standing by himself near Ahu Tongariki, the biggest single collection of standing moai on the island. It's as if he just didn't get along with the rest of the gang. The long ahu is sort of behind and to the right of this shot, and looking away from them like this makes for a pretty desolate scene, don't you think?

Bottom, Ahu Ko Te Riku, near Hanga Roa town. This fellow's eyes are replicas. He's the only moai with eyes, and it's to demonstrate how much more imposing (creepy?) the moais all must have looked back when they all had eyes. There is one moai fragment with its original eyes in the Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum near Hanga Roa.

All are HDRs processed in Photomatix and CS5 using Nik plug-ins. The top two are texturized. The texture in the middle photo was shot on the same trip, in Lima. Click them to make them bigger. There are 50-something photos in the Easter Island Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Not Many Choices Around Here, Frank. How About We Try Easter Island?

Blowing Glass, Halifax HDR

These guys were at work at a glass factory along the boardwalk in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when we walked by.

Here, after re-exposing a single RAW photo several times in Adobe Bridge and re-combining them in Photomatix Pro, we're using a Nik Software duplex filter and lots of layers and masks in Photoshop CS5. Shot with a Nikon D-700. Click it to make it quite a bit bigger, and see more HDRs here, and more from Canada here.

Ten Places of Worship - Wednesday HDRs

Enjoy these HDRs of churches in Ethiopia, Italy, Lithuania, Panama, Cuba, Latvia and on St. Helena Island. Click any of them to make them much bigger. There are almost 400 more HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

The first two are from St. James Church, the oldest Anglican church in the southern hemisphere, St. Helena Island, South Atlantic Ocean:

These next two are from the Riga Cathedral, Riga, Latvia:

Here is the Catedral de la Virgen María de la Concepción Inmaculada de La Habana, Havana, Cuba:

Maritime Canada - Wednesday HDRs

There's been a little time to process some of the photos we brought back from Nova Scotia. Here are five: 1. The waterfront at Halifax. 2. The lighthouse at Peggy's Cove. 3. Boat, Peggy's Cove. 4 & 5 are two treatments of another boat at Peggy's Cove.

All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop using Nik Software. Click 'em to make them bigger. The texture in photo number five comes from SkeletalMess with thanks. More HDRs here.

Unexpected Opera House - Wednesday HDRs

The Sydney Opera House from vantage points you don't usually see. Both shots taken across the harbour at the Taronga Zoo in the suburb of Mosman.

All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop. Click 'em to make them bigger. More HDRs here, and more from Sydney and the zoo (koalas and stuff) in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Churches - Wednesday HDRs

It's gotten to be a little project lately. Anytime we're visiting somewhere new I try to pop into a local church and get enough shots to put together an HDR photo. Since churches aren't places to be big and brash and American, coming in, taking over and spreading out with a tripod, these usually have to be hand held brackets and some are more successful than others. They all seem to require substantial processing.

Here are some from a few of our last trips. Click them all to make them bigger. They're from Havana, Cuba, St. Helena Island, Panama City, Panama and Riga, Latvia.

See them all, along with 380 other HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And if any of them catches your fancy you can see more photos in the Cuba, St. Helena, Panama and Latvia galleries. All these were shot with Nikon cameras, processed in Photomatix with various Nik plug-ins and finished in Photoshop.

 

EarthPhotos.com Announces Digital Downloads

Today I'm happy to announce Digital Downloads on EarthPhotos.com. Just about all of the 18,691 photos on EarthPhotos may now be downloaded immediately. Two sizes are on offer.

You can buy a Web Size image, roughly 640x480 pixels in size, or 0.3 megapixels. This is suitable for web sharing on social sites like Facebook. Or you can buy a 1Mpix image, roughly 1 megapixel in size. These photos are for your personal, and not commercial use (Read Personal License). The 1 Mpix download is roughly 816x1224 pixels, about big enough to print an 8x12.

And we want to help with your commercial application. We're proud of our lion photo in Afar Magazine. It remains the Most Popular Photo on EarthPhotos.com, as voted by users. A couple of weeks back, we placed a photo on a kids' show for German TV. All these commercial applications are different, so please talk with us about what you need.

 

Stuck in the Sixties - Wednesday HDRs from Havana

These Havana photos have been a lot of fun to work on. Click each to make them bigger. There are three dozen photos up now in the Cuba Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Probably will be another dozen or so. See also the HDR Gallery.

Wednesday HDR - Back from Havana Version

There's just about no internet in Cuba. No internet cafés, no internet in private homes. There's slow internet in hotel public areas, but we opted not to spend the time squeezing photos through the wires, so we have lots to catch up on about Cuba.

And there's lots to say, but I'd rather not be hasty. I want to let all our impressions steep for a few days before I make my inevitable brash and presumptious generalizations about the lot of the Cuban people. It'll come, over time.

For today, here's one of the first photos I've posted to the new Cuba Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Keep an eye on that gallery. It'll grow steadily over the next few weeks.

We've all heard there are old cars like this in Hanava. What's surprising is how many there are - just hundreds upon hundreds. Many, many more than I expected. Click this photo to get a much bigger version.

This shot comes from multiple exposures of a single RAW, shot with a Nikon D-700, combined in Photomatix & finished in CS5 with Nik tools, including my new favorite, Viveza 2. If you like this, you might check out 365 other HDRs in theEarthPhotos.com HDR Gallery.