actually this town is called Pripjat, the biggest ghosttown in the world! 48000 people used to live here, mostly employees of the nearby nuclear power plant of chornobyl, until on april 26 1986 a chain reaction made a part of reactor nr.4 to explode and spread a massive amount of radioactive material all over north western part of europe and of course the nearby regions including several villages and the biggest town in the area of pripjat.
during my stay in kiev i got the opportunity to join one of the rare group tours that get to visit the locked down military zone (30km in diameter around the reactor) including the reactor itself and the ghost town. really bizarre trip and i definatly gonna post some more shots when i get home. this photo is probably not the best i got on my trip so far and i would have liked to submit a couple of other shots for this FS but unfortanetely i have most of my shots on cd's and don't have access to them in this internet caffe here in moldava so here goes the probably most bizarre image of the trip.
the picture was taken from a roof of an abandoned hotel overlooking the southern part of the town of pripjat and the collapsed reactor in the background, you can see how close the town was built to the reactor...
resizing and saving for web was done by a friend of mine, because i did't have access to any editing software here so this one falls under minimal editing, which will probably cause some people to say it looks flat and stuff but i don't care to much. well, i guess i'll see, i predict a mid 4 ;)
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haha, almost another brown!
big thanks to the people who actually "got" the bleakness of the shot and it's connection to the photo.
i wish i could have editited it and would have probably submitted a b&w version (as deb suggested), but it's still interesting to see how minimal edited images like these score so horribly bad in challenges.
This location must be nirvana to a searcher for lost (un)civilizations like you ;-). The trees look healthy! I'll hear more about this place from my Ukrainian hairdresser... Thanks for the revelation.
It's interesting this one, because on the verge of clicking a low vote. On reading the title and looking for longer I realise how deeply affecting this image is. I'm intrigued to know what you were doing here and what you may have discovered for yourself.
This is one scene that would look a whole lot less impactful for some good 'golden hour' light. The drab, depressive quality of the flat light is what makes one dwell on the events that happened there. I may have been tempted to desaturate a little further and add gravitas by boosting the contrast (which I'd do in Lab colour and mess with levels on the Lightness channel which does not affect colour).
An interesting facility to photograph - I find it intriguing how healthy the trees are and how abandonned it looks (and is, I'm quite sure.) The light is rather flat which renders the photograph a bit dull - not much you can do about it other than to wait for better light. The composition seems somewhat unstructured, though I'm also not sure how to recommend a better composition. I wonder if this might have a bit more impact in B&W with some additional contrast added.
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