At Home or in the Studio

The simplest route is to select an object big enough for you to be able to photograph its details rather than the whole thing (where you would just photograph it from all sides and be done with it) that at the same time varies in form, color, or texture. Skip the shorter focal lengths, go for the long end of your zoom lens. Or use a telephoto lens. The ideal is to at first work only under one constant light source and to follow the contrasts between lights and shadows. These two can be taken as part of the composition.

Actually—take a look at the pictures of the following plaster sculpture. The first picture shows the whole sculpture, just for documentation. The pictures after it are photographed from various sides and with various rotations of the object but while keeping the same light properties (intensity and hardness). This illustrates that even on a pure white object, dark shadows can create compositionally interesting situations that are worth recording—most importantly, various guidelines and diagonals.

The plaster object used for this composition exercise.

Seeking Composition #1.

Seeking Composition #2.

Seeking Composition #3.

Seeking composition #4.

Seeking composition #5.

Fear Not and Go Forth

You can continue in the same way with “real” objects outdoors. Here you may no longer have full control over the scene’s lighting, but your possibilities are expanded all the more. You can return to a subject in various day lighting and even at various times of the year. The library building in our illustrations below is interesting architecturally, but here we’ll focus on how it’s interesting photographically: “very.” All of the following pictures are about one and the same building, even if looking at them, that may seem unbelievable.

Library #1.

Library #2.

Library #3.

Large subjects can be disorienting at first, because they offer you multiple ways of approaching composition. You can do things like focus on the expression of depth between the foreground or background, or play with perspective. You can be right next to the subject and shoot upwards to express its height, or stand far away from it and create a different point of view. You can take a wide-angle lens or take one with a longer lens and create a number of interesting crops. Seek new pictures within pictures. It is not for nothing that one of the old photographic maxims says: while a painter works with an empty canvas, the photographer starts with a readied picture and gradually simplifies it.

Library #4—detail shot.

Library #5—detail shot.

Library #6—detail shot.

By the way, if you want to make your indoor composition exercise more difficult, try working with the most basic of geometric objects. Put a cube or sphere in your photography workspace and use a simple background (white, gray, or black). This lets you then focus on lines and structure, contrast among individual objects, and the background.

Train with Iron Balls on Your Feet

Once you get the various compositional rules under your skin thanks to these exercises, you will have a much easier time during “real” photography. Walk up to an object and you will not need to think for long about whether to put it in the middle, place it in this or that golden-mean crop, or try to find the scene’s guidelines. You will just see them there right away. For me personally, these exercises came in handy when I went on afterwards to do documentary work, where the action in front of the lens waited for nobody, and I had to make my compositional choices completely on instinct.

Some closing advice—for every photograph, imagine the placement in space of an object like the one you are photographing. Imagine ways to harness the surroundings into the photograph, and perhaps even to adding extra objects. This gives a wide range of other ways to practice your composition. And don’t forget that you need a different composition for a single object  on its own and for two, three, four, or more objects together.

So we took off for a rather unexpected destination: a local college campus. I sincerely never would have thought to take my camera there, but the work we got done that day definitely convinced me that this campus and the shopping area within it conceal many interesting architectural motives. And Tom used these to show me “how composition actually works.”

The way the session started out was just about ideal in my book, as one of Tom’s first pieces of advice was:

You see, that was music to my ears at first. I soon discovered though that the less I sweated exposition, the more I sweated the question of “what to shoot.”

Even his second suggestion didn’t help me much in that department: it was “compose right in your viewfinder.” That is, accept naturally what I see in the camera as the final, framed picture. I shouldn’t be afraid of this, he said; there would always be room for minor crops, like for straightening the horizon—after all, most DSLR viewfinders only show about 95% of the picture. But. But! WHAT should I photograph?

One of Tom's shots. Despite all my efforts, I couldn't even come close to this.

I should give some context here. For me, “compositionally attractive scene” is just a weird phrase that makes me think of half-naked women. And definitely not shop windows. But my photographic mentor didn’t leave me hanging, and consistently drew my eyes to good spots for interesting shots. I had a chance to watch him at work and see the results right on his camera’s display. That opened my eyes and I started really seeing my surroundings, and taking pictures of my own.

Armed with this advice, I headed out for the hunt. Although I’m definitely not satisfied with the results (shown below along with with Tomáš’s commentary), it only took two hours with a teacher on my tail and I started looking around me with different eyes. What seemed at first glance to be the most boring of spots suddenly revealed an enormous photographic potential. I started seeking out shop-window reflections, concentrated on guidelines, and noticed what a difference it makes in a picture just to have a hand pointing at an object. Two hours and a hundred puzzled stares from passersby later, I concluded our outing with a payback coffee (but I had, and deserved, one too). As we sat sipping, we went over how this or that photo could have been done better.

Learning is trial and error... Tomáš is showing me the errors.

Below are my photographs, followed by Tomáš’s commentary. The photos are not processed in any way. Naturally I normally would improve their exposure and for example straighten their horizons in Zoner Photo Studio.

Tomáš: Sometimes it's good to make use of lines in architecture—where it's feasible, of course—and align them parallel to the frame. The photo then "fits," and the scene's contours form a sort of anchor, a reference element.

Tomáš: Because we were working in an area of "angular" architecture, there were few opportunities to catch jagged edges, curves, and guidelines. In this picture there is an excellent extra element—the bird, without which the photo would be divided in two.

Tomáš: Watch out for the horizon here. The centered composition is essentially welcome in my book: it's a match for the whole scene.

Tomáš: Here what would be great is another element to liven things up. Like a person walking out, or by. Sometimes you need to wait for the right moment. Otherwise it would be (and is) just one more centered picture that doesn't stand on its own.

Tomáš: Here again, watch out for the tilted horizon. You might be able to get even closer, or use zoom to draw in the element in the picture's center—to eliminate the almost empty space around the edges.

Tomáš: Ask yourself—did you think about the use of any composition rules or recommendations here, or not? It seems to me like you just came up to the building and photographed it in the first way that occurred to you. There are definitely more composition options available here—use the zoom, leave out the roof or cameras, etc.

Even though I took a beating from Tomáš on this shoot, I have to say that I agree with his evaluations of my photos 100%, and I’m really looking forward to the rest of the Professionals Teach Me Photography series. I hope that you will be following and sharing this new series too, but most of all I hope it inspires you to head out and try similar exercises on your own.

My first visit to this city, in 2007, was fleeting, and what’s more it was snowing, it was cold, one of the city’s eternal military parades was going on due to some holiday or other, and all of Red Square was closed. Not to say that the square is Moscow’s only attraction or even its most interesting, but still—it’s kind of a “must-see,” and also it’s right in the heart of the city.

Canon EOS 20D, EF-S Canon 18–55 mm F3.5–5.6 IS, 1/125 s, F7.1, ISO 400, focal length 18 mm, stitched panorama

This time it was different—in Moscow, April means spring is almost beginning, and on some days, the temperature rose to a marvelous 20 degrees celsius (almost 70 degrees). Another difference was that I was in Moscow on business and alone (if I don’t count my colleagues from Russian distribution firms and another roughly 10 million anonymous citizens of the city). Naturally I knew from the start that not everything would be rose-colored and go precisely to plan; after all, this wasn’t my first time in Russia and I knew what I was getting into. But even still looking back later I had to smile and wonder at what all one person can experience during one “ordinary” business trip.

Canon EOS 20D, EF-S Canon 18–55 mm F3.5–5.6 IS, 1/250 s, F10, ISO 400, focal length 18 mm.

The adventure began right after I arrived at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, where a car and driver awaited me. After I got in the car he put on the latest Russian pop at full blast and told me to be seated comfortably, as it would be a long ride. And he was right. The roughly 45 km route from the airport to the center of Moscow can be handled in less than an hour under ideal conditions, but there’s precisely the problem—in Moscow there are never ideal (road) conditions.We reached the hotel after four hours spent in start-stop traffic.

And to spice it all up, the hotel I had reserved was in reality not reserved at all and they sent me to another one, saying that for the next day we’d “reach an agreement somehow.” Both hotels were in the center of Moscow, but my replacement hotel was lower-quality, more expensive, and lacked breakfast. Just one of many Russian paradoxes. After the first night it was clear I would be moving, because this “dormitory” was somewhat beneath my expectations (and I’m not picky; once on Olkhon Island in the Baikal I slept in a wooden shack next to an animal shed). In defense of my employer I have to say they’re not the ones who picked the hotel. I “reserved” my bed, and I had to (not) lay in it.

Apparently the hotel staff had also decided I should move, because in the evening after I returned from the fair, I found my things (including my expensive camera) bundled up in the hall. Checkout, they said, had been at one. But how do you want to explain to a young Mongolian lady speaking minimal Russian that you work until 7 p.m. and need to at least have your things packed into a wardrobe after checkout? What we had here was a failure to communicate. So I took my suitcase, laptop, purse, and camera and went on my steaming way out into the streets of Moscow.

Canon EOS 20D, EF-S Canon 18–55 mm F3.5–5.6 IS, 1/125 s, F7.1, ISO 400, focal length 18 mm.

After my experience with the airport I knew full well that a taxi would be worthless, so I took it as a sporting activity and dragged my things a few blocks, and kilometers, onward. The route was pure luxury—down posh Petrovka, more one big fashion mall than a street—then around Bolshoi theatre, Red Square and the like. Along the way I caught the eye of various young Russian gentlemen, one of whom helped me with the suitcase through a stair-heavy pedestrian underpass. I must have looked pretty exotic; the local lofty ladies with their high heels and perfect makeup visibly wouldn’t be caught dead dragging a suitcase through Moscow.

Canon EOS 20D, EF-S Canon 18–55 mm F3.5–5.6 IS, 1/250 s, F5.6, ISO 400, focal length 18 mm.

Canon EOS 20D, EF-S Canon 18–55 mm F3.5–5.6 IS, 1/100 s, F5.6, ISO 400, focal length 18 mm.

The rest of my business trip went fairly smoothly. Moscow is not as dangerous as they said (and they said it to me a lot). A person just has to pay attention to where they’re going, but then, that’s true for any kind of trip. What was significantly worse, to me, were the ubiquitous hurry and crowds; in the metro during rush hour, it’s literally body-on-body. On the other hand navigation in the Metro, even though it has 12 lines and 185 stations and handles one of the heaviest burdens of any subway system, was easy. My journeys always contained a little sadness though, as I glanced at the “grannies” in their watchpoints by each escalator, guardians of order in the Metro. Definitely unenviable work.

The fair itself and the job of presenting Zoner Photo Studio and its new features was problem-free; I just had to armor myself against a few minuses that always come with a business fair in Russia (in my opinion at least):

• Russian girls are born hostesses/models. They take up these roles so naturally and are so willing to go so far with presenting their bodies for photographers and the thousands of visitors that it’s unbelievable, and a little unbearable.
• People are often a bit inconsiderate, pushing each other, butting in line, interrupting each other etc.
• The least pleasant visitors at any stand are ultra-rich buffoons, the “New Russians,” who know it all even when they know nothing.
• On the last day of the fair, people take everything that isn’t tied down, even your chocolate or your magazine (but maybe this isn’t unique to Russia).

Canon EOS 20D, EF-S Canon 18–55 mm F3.5–5.6 IS, 1/25 s, F13, ISO 100, focal length 18 mm.

If you can get past these few negatives, then you’ll discover that the majority of visitors are fine people who don’t mind at all that you have an accent or you sometimes have to search for words. And for me as a Czech, this went double. Just as it had at earlier fairs in St. Petersburg. Russians everywhere seem to have a soft spot for my country, whether they have already visited, or are still just dreaming of doing so.

My last day and a half in Moscow were free days, and I took advantage of this with genuinely aimless strolls through the city, sitting for coffee, and taking pictures. Even though I am quite the city girl, after a few visits to St. Petersburg and Moscow I have to say that, at least when it comes to Russia, I prefer towns and country. While they’re not places of endless possibilities, at least a person knows what they’re into.

Canon EOS 20D, EF-S Canon 18–55 mm F3.5–5.6 IS, 1/400 s, F13, ISO 400, focal length 18 mm.

Another factor in the “attractiveness” of the Chernobyl catastrophe is the aura of mysticism coming from nuclear energy itself—the invisibility and imperceptibility of its deadly radiation. After an accident, radioactive isotopes that were just a short while ago producing heat to spin steam turbines are suddenly infiltrating cells and turning water molecules into free radicals that attack DNA chains, alter them, and mutate a whole organism. People who were on the site of the catastrophe right after the event describe the radiation as being like the air after a storm, accompanied by a feeling of pinpricks in the face. Under the influence of strong radiation, the air ionizes and ozone is created, so the comparison to air after a storm is apt. Scientist and author Alexey Kupnii, whom we met in nearby Slavutych and whose workplace was the Chernobyl Sarcophagus, did not always use a dosimeter to guide his work, but sometimes instead went by smell. When he smelled ozone, he knew he was near a place with a radiation level of over 5,000 rentgens an hour, which meant one thing only—time to disappear. (Incidentally, Slavutych itself is a fascinating place on its own; it was founded soon after the accident as a place to house Chernobyl cleanup staff.)

Long years spent working in the Sarcophagus are commemorated in an authentic plaque: "Ukrainian Nuclear Power Committee, Production Collective, Chernobyl NPP, 'Sarcophagus' Installation." Photographed in a Slavutych home.

Last but not least for us as a photography blog, there is nothing more attractive for the lens than the elements of an abandoned civilization. Moreover, sheerly in terms of size, the city of Pripyat is unique among modern ruins.

The restricted zone is a territory 2600 km2 in size. Once, thousands of people lived in the cities and villages here. This area was once characterized not by disaster, but by the meanders and basins of the Pripyat and Dnieper rivers and the dams that supply Kiev with drinking water. Today, the territory is essentially abandoned by Man, and this despite the fact that the radiation level has fallen to a level safe for life. One can of course encounter anomalous areas where the radioactivity level suddenly leaps upwards. But there is no risk of the rise of new mutated species, nor giant mushrooms. These are just myths that blur the true seriousness and nature of the problem.

The Zone is for lovers…

Nature has coped in the Zone very well, and today the region is home to rare species of flora and fauna. This is related not to radiation but simply to the fact that Man has left the Zone and thus left the area open to species that were formerly suffocated by civilization. The territory has become a paradise for naturalists (see for example the documentary Radioactive Wolves). The region’s bedrock is primarily sandstone and so pine trees are abundant here, but the area is also home to beech groves and grassy plains.

…the hope of a mystery under every rock…

Visitors come here for answers to questions that they’ve actually never really formulated. The sci-fi novella Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, immortalized in film as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, characterizes these visitors and their questions eerily well, when you consider that it was written before the tragedy. Chernobyl cannot be taken as just a new era’s Disneyland, even though some junk-food-style tours do take it as one, showily leading visitors through nursery schools with piles of gas masks and jumbles of abandoned toys.

It’s a place for meditation, one that forces you to mull upon nuclear safety, on how much humans are truly the masters of processes based on nuclear chain reactions. I get the feeling that, in my own country especially, belief in nuclear safety is still almost unbounded. But it’s evident that even with several layers of protection, accidents can happen. When one does occur, the human factor comes into play, a fallible factor. In the case of Chernobyl, the authorities put fear for their jobs over concern for the safety of their citizens. At Fukushima, the situation was more positive, but it still can’t be said that the government and the energy company TEPCO did all that they could.

…did the cloud of fallout look like this…

…zooming past the trees, just like the firemen, soldiers, and liquidators did.

Like Auschwitz, Chernobyl is a memento, a reminder of human fallibility and the relativity of all security measures.

I came here not alone, but as part of a film crew, and the thoughts expressed above are what drew us to these inhospitable, yet very interesting parts. I, David Mencl (director and camera), Tomáš Klein (production), Tomáš Elšík (equipment), and Tomáš Merta (robotics) first failed to get the needed permits at home, then headed out anyway in a van full of gear to Kiev, with the conviction that the best route will be to handle everything in-country, do some basic exploration, and meet people involved in the topic.

The crew with our Kiev host, Dmitry.

A scene from the process of preparing rentgen film to be used for directly capturing radioactivity in the Zone. AGFA 24×30 cm medicinal film, expired 6×9 AGFA sheet film, and Dentix E 3×4 cm dental film.

The team burns candles for good luck in a chapel en route (at the Czech-Polish border).

Our mood constantly fluctuated between euphoria and disappointment. We were overjoyed when someone promised us the possibility of heading out to the Zone within just two days, even for only an hour. We suffered as telephones lay unanswered in agencies and estimates were given to us on the order of 800 US dollars per day our group would spend in the Zone.

Ultimately our team ended up concentrating on finding people who worked in the Zone, were born there, or were otherwise connected with it. Conversations with them were a valuable yardstick for our understanding of Chernobyl; they provided us details that we otherwise would have had no chance to read or hear. Meeting a person who made multiple illegal expeditions into the heart of the Sarcophagus is a mystical experience all on its own. As for permits, we discovered that there is no other path than to send a fax (!) with the official form to the ministry and wait ten working days for their statement.

The Chernobyl Museum.

The statement is back now and was positive, so tomorrow our plan is to film the commemorative Chernobyl Day event in which its then-citizens arrive to respect the memory of the dead and meet with those who were once their neighbors. Even as late as ten years after the tragedy, this event had a deep atmosphere of sadness, but the tragic dimension has faded over time and now it is steeped in optimism. I hope that this optimism will be palpable to you as well in my upcoming all-photographic article documenting the event.

Our plan for the next two days is to take a tour of locations and do our first takes, but the core of the film will come during one of the future visits that we will be needing to make in order for this film to be a success. Chernobyl is a place unlike any other, and it’s no wonder that plans and reality here often part ways.

A school field trip to the Chernobyl Museum. Kiev, April 26th, 2012.

I’m Nobody’s Example

Right now I’m looking at the folders on my computer under “C:\Photos,” and their names are not very informative. If I have to be honest, they’re To-Do 01, To-Do 02, To-Do 03, on up to… well, to very very high. And the oldest of them goes back to last August.

It wasn’t always this way. I used to always back up my pictures to an external disk after each photo outing, to avoid losses. And went straight on to edit them after that too, sometimes all through the night. I hand-sorted all my photographs into folders named by year, month, and day, and from there into RAW and JPEG subfolders. I threw out the botched photos and picked out the best takes of each subject. Then I opened a RAW converter, edited the white balance, rescued pictures from blowout, fine-tuned the colors if needed, etc.

But right now, the situation is what it is, and it’s not much. If my folders were real folders, they’d be in a pile on my floor. No backups on my hard drive (my excuse: “no time!”). So if the wrong equipment breaks at the wrong time, I’ve lost my photos. Except for my photos taken to order, for those I still manage to keep up with backups. I also have 2-month-old pictures still waiting on my camera’s 16GB card for me to pour them into my computer. Really as someone who Writes About Photography I shouldn’t be admitting any of this, since I should be an example. But I’m also only human. I guess you can take all this as a warning and, if nothing else, at least back up your photos (!) even if you still save the rest “for later” like me.

If It Ain’t Broken and It’s Not Life or Death

What keeps me procrastinating in my photo processing? Things that seem like bigger priorities. Notice I’m not saying “things that are higher priority.” And it’s not like I’ve decided I’ll never have time to process photos. Heck, I’d do it right this moment, but there is always something else on my mind: something to write here, photos promised yesterday there, a slightly overflowing inbox, and coffee with the So-and-so’s in an hour and a half. Of course to be honest I could leave out the coffee, but humans are social animals and I don’t want to start feeling inhuman.

Things have reached the point where I delegate the occasional photography orders I get to my friends instead. In short, any but the most burning needs for photography or photo editing will wait.

So I’ve stopped even looking at my C:\Photos folder with its To-Do 01 and To-Do 02. I get up, I cook lunch, I write a short article, I start editing articles from my workmates, I fine-tune my article plan for May… and as for my photos, I never get around to them. I guess they’ll wait for the dog days of summer.

This week on our blog, on Monday we examined in depth the question of photos and DPI. Then with our travelling author Ondřej Hruška took two looks at travel and photography in the Ukraine, first an overview and then a look at visiting Kiev and preparing to see Chernobyl. On our news roundup today, we’ll also be taking an in-depth look at something—photo collections. But each of us in his own way.

Michal Prouza: “This week I’m again taking a trip into history. I ran into an interesting gallery by Sergey Larenkov that combines historical images from the time of the second world war and shots of the same places in the present. The joining of these photographs gives a new and interesting perspective on places that, without this sort of attached context, could and do seem ordinary. It’s the contrast between the scenes in the pairs that really gives them added value. And the war atmosphere oozing from the original scenes also adds a new dimension to the modern ones.”

Photo: Sergey Larenkov

Tomáš Slavíček: “This week I’m returning to my old habit of drawing your eyes towards Boston’s The Big Picture and The Atlantic’s In Focus, because they have the best collections of May Day photos this year that I’ve seen. This day is a bigger deal in our post-Communist country than it probably is in yours, but still much of even the capitalist world saw major May Day demonstrations this year, as you can see in these galleries. (It’s also Lovers’ Day in the Czech Republic, by the way.) The events of this special day took a lot of forms this year, and not just demonstrations. No matter what you were doing on May Day this year, you should check out these once again perfectly chosen photo collections.”

The Big Picture—Entry Page

Martin Kuchař: “This week what caught my eye was the work of advertising photographer Ryan Schude from Los Angeles, whose photographs are exceptional mainly for their unique composition. This little-seen, but for Schude characteristic, photographic image composition has earned him several prestigious awards as well as the chance to work for such clients as AT&T, Camel, and McDonald’s. His signature style always include several “plotlines” caught in pictures and displayed with perfect craftsmanship. Simply unparalleled.”

Photo: Ryan Schude

Jiří Vicherek: Closer to Earth for me. No, I’m not telling you to go back to the land, Closer to Earth is the name of the photo exhibit that really caught my eye this week. It’s by a Czech author—pardon my patriotism!—but the link above takes you to its English page. Stanislav Pokorný, a lawyer by trade, took these landscape photographs during his travels through Europe. Even though I’m more of a portrait fan by nature, these pictures have a magic that is hard to resist. And since I myself am studying law, his rebirth into a photographer is interesting for me personally. His work is on display in Prague and I think I’ll stop by… but I only have until June 17th.”

Photo: Stanislav Pokorný. A lighthouse in Bretagne, France.

If you don’t look like a local boy, that is, smooth-shaven and short-haired with a dress shirt and shiny leather boots, or a Ukrainian woman, definitely with high heels and a dress, thick makeup and sex appeal, then they’ll know you’re not from around here. And the result will definitely be meeting people and letting them practice their English on you. It also will mean some interesting shots of the people and the sights.

Zolote Vorota, Kiev

Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), Kiev

Kiev’s Key Points

Khreshchatyk Boulevard is fascinating. On the weekends it’s closed to automobile traffic in the afternoon and evening (imagine that in New York!), and it’s full of smiling people, musicians, and entertainment. On the opposite end from the square, just by the statue of Lenin, there’s the Pinchuk Art Centre, the Museum of Modern Art, paid for by oil money. Mr. Pinchuk created an institute in Kiev on par with any western museum, and you can find here some of the greatest hits of world art. But there are much older things here worth seeing too, like the Zoloti vorota—the historical city gate—and the Orthodox monastery called the Pechersk Lavra (a UNESCO site), full of unbelievable mosaics and churches, with tons of gold on the roofs. All of these historical buildings offer an ideal opportunity for touristic photography. But if your schedule is tight, don’t count on catching the right light and be ready to be satisfied with what’s there and your own ability to take advantage of any situation.

Beyond the monasteries, above the Dnieper, rises the monumental Rodina Mat (“Mother Motherland”) statue, a gift to Kiev from Moscow—this is why it is turned to face Moscow. Beside the statue is a patriotic collection of WWII memorials with larger-than-life statues of partisans in a concrete cave, water pools, and a museum of military technology.

Vodka Drinkers in Carpathian Ruthenia

Another interesting place in Kiev is the water park, a bizarre place with water rides on a Dnieper island. And then there is the whole region between Andriyivskyy Descent, the Saint Sophia Cathedral, and Kontraktova Square, the city’s original site of settlement. Saint Sophia Cathedral is the main church of Kiev. Andriyivskyy Descent leads downhill from the St. Andrew Church to Kontraktova Square, and is full of painters and trinket-sellers.

This is your place if (God forbid) you want to buy kitschy “folk” pictures and USSR memorabilia. Unfortunately at the moment the whole street is under construction, and it may still be when Kiev hosts the EURO 2012 soccer championships.

Khreshchatyk on the weekend

Kontraktova is an independent “downtown of its own,” with several memorials. It’s a favorite place for meetups. Not far from here is the museum of the Chernobyl tragedy, and the square itself is home to a restaurant from the Puzata Chata chain, which you simply must visit.

At any time of the day or night here, you can taste every dish of the Ukrainian and Russian cuisine, things like salads, borsch, shchi (cabbage soup), pelmeni and
variki dumplings, meat prepared in a variety of ways, side dishes from potatoes and more, omlettes, all manner of sweet or salty baked goods, fruit juices, and
kvas (fermented bread drink – vastly better than it sounds). The pleasant thing about it all is that even if your eyes are bigger than your stomach, you’ll still pay
just about six dollars, and all you’ll regret is that your own country doesn’t approach its national cuisine the same way.

Thanks to its hilly terrain, Kiev offers photographers a variety of views from above and between, as well as beyond what you’d expect. To get the most out of opportunities like this you want a pretty long lens, 135 and above, which offers a new and more entertaining use for your camera than just portraits of beautiful people with fuzzy backgrounds.

The still-incomplete Puzniaky housing complex, Kiev

Ditjatki Checkpoint, entryway to the Zone

Chernobyl

The Ukraine is an inexpensive country, but a visit to Chernobyl is something you can pay for in dollars… in hundreds of dollars. Everyone wants to visit the Zone; the Ukrainian government is aware of it, and knows how to profit from it. There’s an entire ministry devoted just to the Zone’s administration, and several travel agencies organize Zone packages. And as hinted above, a day trip from them runs in the hundreds. However! If you look hard enough, you can also find trips in the hundreds of hryvnias.

But all you can expect from this type of trip is a sort of Disneyland ride. “Experienced” guides walk you through abandoned schools and point at piles of gas masks and rotting empty beds in elementary schools. Unfortunately you have no hope of any kind of transcendental experience, which is in my opinion something that the Zone does have to offer.

Now, it happens that I actually came to the Ukraine as part of a film crew, with very specific plans as to what we wish to do in the Zone and how long we want to stay, and a budget that does NOT match… if we go by the usual channels. So we were left to seek alternatives, and started with Czech photographers that have extensive experience with the Zone, Václav Vašků, Petr Toman, and Martin Wágner. Through them and the information and contacts they provided, we made our way to insiders, film producers, guides, and people with roots in the Zone.

Orane, Ekopolis camp, cottage

From there it was just a small step to communicate with the Ministry directly, which was a Kafkaesque experience. And yet still, despite the Ministry’s closed-mindedness, they do have some understanding for low-budget student projects, and enabled us to work for five days in the Zone with our own car, a hexacopter, and a mobile remote-control robot. It only took three days of nonstop communication, all in Russian, all directly in Kiev.

To sum up the basics of entering the Zone: acquiring a normal permit takes ten working days, a passport with no irregularities, and a doctor’s permit for the kind of dose you can expect there (if you’re pregnant, forget it). You’ll also need patience or the extra cash it takes to have a travel agency handle the paperwork. And in my opinion, to make it actually worthwhile, you need to bring with you the proper respect, and knowledge of the accident, the region, and radioactivity basics.

As I write these words, I am at the Ekopolis camp in the village of Orane, 12 kilometers from the Zone, where every person, tree, and stone is influenced in some way by the Chernobyl accident of April 26th, 1986. One grandma in the village has just told me that all we really should film is the local graveyard.

Graveyard