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raxo (not verified) says:

That is some creepy stuff

guest (not verified) says:

Someone should now make a horror movie there. Will be much better then Silent Hill for sure.

Ben (not verified) says:

Man, great article, BUT... holy cow, aren't there any current photos of the place that haven't had the HDR filter run on them? Seriously, it's kind of annoying and unnecessary for documenting historical subject matter. End gripe.

David (not verified) says:

Pics in this story don't seem to work. Tried Windows 7, XP and OS X (IE8, 7 and Safari)

Simone (not verified) says:

Thanks everyone for commenting!

@Ben: Just google Chernobyl and you'll get tons of current pics without HDR. As the article explains, we made a conscious decision to contrast the aesthetic appeal achieved through HDR with the stark reality of the place. It's our take on a retrospective, not a documentary of which you will also find tons elsewhere.

@David: Pics seem to work fine. Maybe they were just slow loading? Sometimes it helps to use a new browser window.

Dave W. (not verified) says:

At some point don't you see that you have taken your HDR WAY TOO FAR? I feel like I was looking at a cartoon. HDR is great and it has its place, and this would be the place... but to a realistic degree. I shouldn't be thinking... "where is Bugs Bunny in this shot?"

alxman2021 (not verified) says:

"Pics in this story don’t seem to work. Tried Windows 7, XP and OS X

(IE8, 7 and Safari)" <--There's your problem lol.

Brian (not verified) says:

Take it easy with the HDR, it just looks stupid

Kip (not verified) says:

Please don't HDR pictures in the future. It's a nice gesture but unnecessary and gaudy.

HDR is overused (not verified) says:

Seriously, stop using HDR so freaking much, it ruins it.

dw (not verified) says:

this is why HDR is awful !

ditto (not verified) says:

Ditto to what Ben said.

Alex White (not verified) says:

Totally agree with Ben on this one. Why the HDR treatment? totally inappropriate for this type of photo journalism.

Jeez (not verified) says:

enough with hdr picture already...
it's supposed to make the pictures look better... but it's clearly not ...

dave (not verified) says:

It would have been good to see non-HDR photos, as even as lovely and haunting as HDR is, it's not exactly well-suited for projects like this. To make a great poster, sure, but not to seriously document anything.

Chris Yule (not verified) says:

Anyone played Call of Duty 4? - these photographs are clearly the source material for the Sniper section in Prypiat. The HDR is annoying though.

bobon (not verified) says:

let me guess, you are against nuclear energy?

Elvis (not verified) says:

COD4 deja vu. ^^ there are 2 pictures there that are spot on.

Chris (not verified) says:

More real photos, less HDR, made the article kind of stupid with all of the doctored photos.

fergville (not verified) says:

agree with ben about the HDR!!!! what's the point?!? it's way too overused these days.

roger burke (not verified) says:

Pretty bad HDR, you should use regular photos

Mango (not verified) says:

Seriously, get rid of the fucking shitty HDR.

High Dynamic Range is not supposed to look like that, you're just pushing all unnecessary sliders to the max in Photomatix or Photoshop, and it just looks terrible.

When I want to click on a Chernobyl before and now site, I want to see accurate representations of what it REALLY LOOKS LIKE.

Fail, photographer. Fail.

civik (not verified) says:

Enough with the HDR already. I'd prefer to see the photos unaltered.

bently34 (not verified) says:

Wow. This is in call of duty 4.. looks the same exact way.

jds (not verified) says:

Can we please tone down the photos? The post-processing hurts my eyes and makes it hard to actually see what state the place is in. Can you just post pictures of what it looks like, not some "artists rendition"?

Rich (not verified) says:

I agree with Ben and not just put through HDR but done soooo badly. Look at the strange halo round "The Chernobyl monument with the cooling tower of Reactor No. 4 in the background"

Why go all the way there, take some great pictures only to completely stuff them up with post processing.

Bonkers (not verified) says:

WOW! Must be the radiation that makes all the colors and the sky look so strange! The should shoot a movie there! Looks like friggin CG!

Phil (not verified) says:

Good article, but what's with the HDR?

anna (not verified) says:

yeah. bad hdr, no more please

Sergio Cantu (not verified) says:

They designed Call of Dudy World at War based on a few places in Pripyat, like the swiming pool and the ferris wheel.
I hope they do something similar with COD Word at War 2.

Nice!

Matt (not verified) says:

I agree Ben. The HDR make the place look creepy and people who don't know that HDR is might think the place actually does look like that.

Gerard (not verified) says:

Please could you post the photos without the HDR post-production; they really don't do anything but devalue the memory of Chernobyl.

Lono (not verified) says:

excellent story, i just wish the photographer hadnt altered EVERY SINGLE IMAGE with that high dynamic range editing garbage.

its the visual equivalent of Auto-Tune and it should die.

jimmy (not verified) says:

could these pics be any more edited up? the lenin square pics looks totally fake.

john (not verified) says:

cool post, but this would be a lot better without the obnoxious HDR processing

hmmm (not verified) says:

The pictures would probably have more impact if all the "now" pictures weren't prettied up with HDRI processing.

Michael Karnerfors (not verified) says:

Very pretty post, and Timm's pics are indeed beautiful and eerie.

Let me just quickly fill in a few gaps:

"Reactor No. 4 was eventually covered with a cement sarcophagus that will have to remain around it for thousands of years. Already it has cracks and gaps in it and will need to be replaced sooner rather than later."

A replacement is underway. It's called the New Safe Confinment. It will be a huge arc spanning over the current sarcophagus, and will have huge cranes in the cieling that will help in dismantling the old sarcophagus and the busted reactor. I don't know the current status of the NSC. The last I read about it was that in 2007 the work had been appointed to a firm to deal with.

When the work of dismantling #4 is done, which will take at most I expect 20 years, the area where it stood will be back to normal levels. That does not deal with the contamination in Pripyat and the rest of the surrounding areas... but it's better than having the wreck remain in place.

"The remaining 14 or 15 active Russian reactors of the same type have supposedly been corrected so that a repeat should not happen. One can only hope so."

Currently there are 12 RBMK-type reactors in use at the moment:

- 4 in Kursk, Russia
- 4 in St Petersburg, Russia
- 3 in Smolensk, Russia
- 1 In Ignalina, Lithuania.

They have been made safer, yes... but not safe enough. There is huge international pressure to close doesn the remaining ones.

Two very important improvements have been made, that make a huge difference though.

1) The fuel. They are no longer allowed to use natural uranium for fuel but must use enriched uranium. The difference this makes is that the so called void feedback coefficient becomes lower.

2) The safety culture. In the soviet Union, your number one priority was to maintain the image of the communist party, or you as a nuclear worker got bumped from your prestigious job at the power plants.. Safety came second. This is gone. These days, safety come first.

To explain a bit more about the fuel: the feedback coefficient is a measure of what happens to a nuclear reactor when it gets too hot. If you have a positive feedback koefficient, that means the nuclear reactor speeds up when the reactor gets hot. That makes it even hotter... speed up the nuclear reaction more... it gets hottter... and so we find thata positive feedback coefficient isn't very positive at all. In a reactor with a negative feedback coefficient, a reactor that gets too hot slows the nuclear reaction down... thus choking itself.

It's like balancing a ball. With positive feedback... you're balancing it on the top of another bigger ball. With negative feedback, you're balancing the ball at the bottom of a round bowl.

What they did with the RBMK's when they switched out the fuel for the more expensive enriched uranium was that they lowered the coefficient. It's still positive... but no longer so horrendoously much as before. It's the difference between balancing a marble on a tennis ball compared to balancing it on a bathing ball.

/Michael

Derek (not verified) says:

Really, really bad tonemapping of those images! Tones those images down and show them for what they are. You aren't helping the images by doing a poor job of post processing.

Max (not verified) says:

I've seen good HDR. But this is not good. Over-saturated photos that distract from the subject matter. If this is supposed to be factual documenting of the changes in Chernobyl - it is not.

Mark (not verified) says:

Pripyat was evacuated 36 hours after the Chernobyl accident, not 3 days later.

I personally visited the Chernobyl area for two days in June 2006 with a friend who is a former resident of Pripyat. We toured the Chernobyl Plant (including the Reactor 4 control room), several of the abandoned villages, and Pripyat. I have posted a photo journal of my trip (with no HDR images) at:

My Journey to Chernobyl: 20 Years After the Disaster

anonymous (not verified) says:

would have been a much better photo essay if all the photos weren't crappy HDR ones.

interesting none the less.

brian (not verified) says:

would have been a much better photo essay if all the photos weren’t crappy HDR ones.

interesting none the less.

George Orwell (not verified) says:

kicking a dead horse here - but year, just say no ... to hdr.

daniele (not verified) says:

HDR was a bad idea. Overdone, tasteless, and clearly inconsistent with the use of pictures that are historical documents.

Nos Lapre (not verified) says:

In this article the author quotes:
"Though it is not possible to live in Pripyat and will not be for the next few thousand years because
of the high radiation etc. etc."
Did not the doomsaying Green/Hippy-style "scientists" in the 1950/1960's say the same thing about
both Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And were they not shown to be charlatans, as both those cities were
cleaned up/re-built and re-populated after just 26 years (1971) and not uninhabitable for many
thousands of years? Those 2 cities have now more, than double the original inhabitants and are
beautiful and prosperous cities, visited by many millions of tourists each year from all over the
globe!!!! These facts can be verified by visiting tourism web-sites or by local Japanese Consulates/
embassies. Thus, if the government and U.N. are willing enough, this could be achieved in the same
manner, that America and the Japanese government have done. The silence of the non-marching doomsayers
is deafening!
Regards,
Nos Lapre.

NARANCS (not verified) says:

Hey Guys!!There is somebody is living in Chernobyl NOW???
Please send an answer to this e-mail:apuska@citromail.hu
THX for help
:D

Travis long (not verified) says:

dude this stuff is werid we leard about it in my school the athough day i was like wow they should make a movie here

homer-strangling-bart-c7785_sml.JPG

TheTimeChamber says:

We took a tour for three days this year, and there are a tonne of non HDR images that can be found here:

Three Days with the zone of Alienation