Shot at sunrise from the lower level of the Galata Bridge toward Beyoglu as nine exposures, processed as an HDR in Photomatix, finished in Photoshop. Texture and a spin through Pixel Bender to make it like an oil painting. Click to see it bigger. And there are currently 357 more photos from Turkey here.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
Taksim Square and the view to the Sea of Marmara, Istanbul, Turkey.
We're climbing aboard British Airways tomorrow. Next batch of posts from one of the world's great cities, Istanbul. Later on next week we'll talk with you from Kyiv, where, as I write this, it looks darned cold.
Photos will go in the Turkey and Ukraine galleries at EarthPhotos.com.
Cheers for now!
The Middle East was the center of the universe last weekend, as the world watched the Egyptian election results and Syria's downing of that Turkish F-4. Tomorrow the North Atlantic moves to the center, with the Obamacare ruling on this side of the ocean and the 1,437th Euro summit on the other.
As the potential first country out of the Eurozone, you'd think Greece would be under enough pressure. But consider its geographical position.
To the east: The Aviationist blog has published a video alongside an article that contends that,
“It is almost a daily practice for the Greek artillery that its radars lock Turkish fighter jets as they illegally enter Greek airspace. However Greeks do not push the button….”
Hard to see how they sort that out anyway, since the distance between many Greek islands and the Turkish mainland is trivial. The island of Samos, for instance, lies scarcely a mile off the Dilek National Park on a tip of Turkish coast.
Then consider Greece's long unhappy relations with its northern neighbor, The Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia, a name Greece insisted on at FYROM's independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, because it felt that "Macedonia implies a territorial claim by Skopje to a province in northern Greece with the same name." Not that anybody calls Macedonia "FYROM."
Now Macedonia and Greece are in an argument ... over license plates. RFERL suggests that this photo from the internet suggests that Greek officials are covering the Macedonian "MK" with FYROM stickers on cars admitted over the Greek border.
Today is the last day for Greeks to trade in those old souvenir Drachmas they've kept in the bottom drawer for Euros. Yesterday was the last day for Finns to trade in their old Markkas.
Meanwhile, today the Turkish Central Bank published this new symbol to represent the Turkish Lira. In 1995 Turkey devalued the old Lira by lopping off the last six zeros. Somewhere I have a photo of our being Lira millionaires, from a 1993 trip to Istanbul.
You can still become a millionaire in Vietnam. At today's rate, all you need to do is trade in US$50 for Vietnamese Dong.
If you click this photo you can see a much bigger version, which is good because there's a lot to see - all the little people and the yellow cabs around Taksim Square, the Galata Tower further on down toward the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara in the background. Just a few of the countless things that make Istanbul one of my top five world cities.*
It's a confluence of civilization, continents and cultures in a breathtaking physical setting. For a kid from the American south, the sound of the call to prayer from all different directions at dusk is hopelessly exotic. Istanbul. What's not to like?
More photos from several trips to Istanbul and Turkey here, and more HDRs here on EarthPhotos.com.
* My top five list: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Paris, San Fransisco, Sydney. Your results may vary.
Istanbul is such an unparalelled location. Europe on the left, Asia across the bridge. You just can't beat it.
Click it to make it bigger. See hundreds more HDRs in the HDR Gallery and lots more of Turkey in the Turkey Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Check out the photos on the left. Next to the Harbour Master's office on a dock in the town of Harlingen, Netherlands, there's a working crane you can spin around. Better, you can rent it and drive it around all night. It's been converted to a hotel room. How could any former little boy resist?
That's my top find in a fun, nearly 300 page directory of strange places to stay from the web site Unusual and Unique Hotels of the World. I recommend you spend some time with it when you're not busy. You'll enjoy it.
Alongside a few tree houses and ice hotels (we'll have our own report from above the Arctic Circle in Lapland at the end of the year) and other offbeat places to stay, there's also a cave hotel in Cappadocia. But there's a destination I can speak of from my own experience, I can heartily recommend the Cappadocia Cave Suites. Extraordinary facility, gracious hospitality. Here's a couple of shots of our room:
After doing yeoman duty for some time as the most popular photo on our photo site EarthPhotos.com, the balloon over Cappadocia, bottom, has been replaced as number one, as voted by users of the site. (Mouse over any photo on EarthPhotos.com to give it a "thumbs up.")
The new number one is an HDR from the morning market at Hoi An, Vietnam. Click the pictures to make them much bigger.
I had occasion to hire a locksmith this week, and as he went about his work he observed that this would be quite an election, this next presidential one. I agreed that was surely true. He said about the President's birth certificate, "Now if they can just prove it's true...."
I was confounded by that. I suggested (perhaps lamely) that if it IS true, what more can they do!?
The energy we expend to prevent reconciliation. Of course, it's not just here in America.
In my book Common Sense and Whiskey, I write about our trip through Tibet:
Just before Xegar stood an imbecilic checkpoint where we waited on the side of the road in the LandCruiser while the local three we’d accrued scampered off into a little squat building that sat, I mean, in the middle of absolutely slap-me-blind nowhere.
Now, man may do worse things to man than to restrict movement in a place so utterly barren, vast and empty, but hardly anything more stupid. So many rules in a place so empty.
That's Tibetans versus Han Chinese.
The Tibetans in exile have just elected a new Prime Minister who has never been to Tibet in an effort by the Dalai Lama to preempt Chinese control of succession after his death. Meanwhile the Chinese insist on vetting the next Dalai Lama.
•••••
As we stood in Armenia near at the Turkish/Armenian border, our guide Levon pointed out
A really big statue on a hill, Georg somebody, Armenian partisan, (who) stands and taunts the Turks still.
That's Armenians versus Turks.
This week Turkey has begun to tear down a Turkish/Armenian friendship statue in the eastern city of Kars, formerly home to a large Armenian population (and the setting for Orhan Pamuk's book Snow). American presidents try to reassure the Armenian diaspora on an 24 April anniversary important to Armenians. This week, President Obama appears to have pleased no one. The Armenians stand, and feel, alone, save for a dubious partner in Russia.
•••••
The Tibetans have clearly and obviously come under come under the Chinese iron hand. The killing of Armenians by Turks (whom I dearly love, and I will argue anywhere that Istanbul is one of the top five cities on the planet) is well established.
If it IS true, what more can they do?
- Photo of the Potala, Lhasa, Tibet from EarthPhotos.com.
From 2007:
Today we’d sail on the Yuzhnaya Palmyra, a ship of the UKRFerry shipping company, on once weekly service Istanbul to Odessa. It was to be an approximately 28 hour crossing of the Black Sea south to north, although we’d have to see about the timing.
Departure was set for 9:00 on the web, 10:00 on our ticket (a hard copy they insisted on sending via DHL for $70 from Ukraine to the U.S.), and 11:00 by the people at the hotel, who made some calls on our behalf. So arrival as well, I suspected, ought to be approximate.
We presented ourselves down at the Karakoy docks shortly past 8:00 a.m. “Actual Time,” as the reception clock had it. We had ample time for a spin up and down ship, stem to stern, and an extended goodbye to the mosques filling the Istanbul skyline, lying at anchor, as we were, just meters across the Golden Horn from Topkapi and Sultanahmet. There would be breakfast service before heaving ho, part of the “three meals a day provided all passengers.”
It may have still been Istanbul outside but it was full Ukraine in the песторан (restaurant). Most of the good Ukrainian women were fat as those Americans they worry about on the news, most everyone smoking wherever possible, and a bunch of smoking and horseplay over a 9:30 breakfast of Slavic breakfast staples, cheese and meat slices, an egg dish and a sausage, a tea bag and aching-sweet juice the color of kvass.
Kvass was a Soviet era concoction a young man named Еѵгєлу (Evgeny) once showed me how to sample back in 1986 in a kiosk outside Red Square – served with the nice Soviet touch of a single, shared glass. Here each got our own glass. Mirja and I shared our table with a family of three women, all in print dresses, and a video-taping man.
Even as you gazed out onto working ships with good Turkish names like the Turgut and The Osman, and teeming local ferries of the Tur Yol line, here came women indefinably Ukrainian, with name tags Iruna and big 'ol Svetlana, slinging plates for six or eight stacked right up their arms. There were pats of butter, and a jug of кетчуп (ketchup) on every table.
Syrupy ballads from the steppes blared straight out of Slavic central casting. They were just enough too loud to notice they were a little too loud.
It took half a year for word to reach the Atlantic coast that gold had been discovered in California. Here, it took three minutes to be jostled by regular, abrupt announcements, way too loud. In the style of receptionists back home, whose announcement echoes across, say, the parking lot of the car dealership, they never thought to put the handset down gently, but instead rattled it around in search of its cradle.
Turkish, Turks will tell you, is useless outside his country's borders. Even inside in this case, as even at the Istanbul dock, the only announcements were in Ukrainian with just an occasional partial English translation.
Further humiliating, the Ukranian home currency, the hyrvna, and the dollar were just about the only ones in play. I had extra Turkish lira, and while they'd trade in them on the Palmyra, I put them away in the (probably idle) hope I could convert them later at a less usurious rate than on the ship.
Lots of smiles among the passengers. A country crowd, I thought, except for young men, most in sleeveless T's or undershirts which apparently pass for cool or maybe virile hereabouts, all painted with the permanent scowl of defiance you see on 17 or 20 year olds worldwide.
I wish I could have telepathically conveyed, on behalf of every other man, the simple notion, "We don't want your (brightly painted) woman."
This week's Wednesday HDR is The Ortakoy Mosque and the Bosphorus Bridge, Europe (near side) and Asia - Istanbul, Turkey. The background is tinted and then the mosque and the boats are painted back in and a texture is added in Photoshop CS5. Click it to make it bigger.
There are more than 300 HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, and more photos from Istanbul in the Turkey Gallery.
We admit to not picking up on the craze on past trips to Turkey. It seems the Patso, or french fry burger, all started when a group of students
"insisted on extra fries in their sandwiches and burgers. And the boss never turned them away, adding more and more fries to each serving, and thus a new item was added to the menu: patso. In time Aktaş expanded the types of patso available: sausage, cheese, chicken and döner. And the rest is evident from the lines in front of his store late into the night."
So the rest is history. But you can revel in it. It's all here: Join Mehmet Usta for the "tale of the transformation of what was essentially a potato sandwich into patso," and find out where the patso craze began.
And click through the logo to the store's web site.
(Turkey is one of the great places on the planet, and there are hundreds of photos from all across Turkey in the Turkey Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. But not a single patso burger.)
Common Sense and Whiskey is the companion to EarthPhotos.com, where you can see and buy professional photo prints from 105 countries and territories around the world, and the blog for Common Sense and Whiskey - the book. It's Intelligent discussion about the world out there.
The Photos:
