A chanting barging smiling waving cider smoking laughing falling cheering stumbling whistling noodles hare hare krishna cider mandolin heaving rozzers chips dips spliffs lager lager lager shouting photos dancing mega mega lightning chanting shouting parking strip-search cider friends cider men in robes smoking cider cider kind of morning.
Tag Archive for Nikon
Photography
Atlantic Sea Wall, Surrey
Funny what you find on Google Maps when you’re looking for a pond that you may or may not have visited years ago. Long story. Today I found a section of Atlantic sea wall, sitting there all blown to bits and looking sorry for itself, which is somewhat unreasonable considering the important role it played in D-Day.
Travel
Lap of Britain in a VW California
Nothing is as big a turn off – on any level – as a caravan. Their sad, beige contents are usually flimsy, they smell of chemical toilets, and they make your car handle like a combine harvester. You’re unwelcome everywhere you go, except for authorised caravan sites where you can mingle with your balding peers and bicker about the latest outrage in the news.
Why anybody would voluntarily do this is beyond me, but a camper van – now that’s an entirely different proposition. For a start you’ve got a vehicle which drives like a car, reverses like a car, and fits in a regular parking space. There’s leather, alloy wheels, a rack for your surfboard and a towing hitch for the trailer with your dirt bikes. Could this be the ideal mix of camping adventure and home comforts? We rent a VW California and take it for a lap of Britain to find out.
Urbex
Kaserne Krampnitz, Germany
Hidden behind the sleepy village of the same name, Krampnitz was originally built for the German cavalry and later used the Soviet army for pretty much the same thing. Today it’s a vast complex of trashed barracks, overgrown parade grounds, and rusting machinery, but it also presents some photogenic secrets for those inclined to keep digging.
Urbex
Beelitz Heilstätten, Germany
Located just 30 minutes south of Berlin, Beelitz Heilstätten is an urban explorer’s paradise. The former tuberculosis therapy centre features 64 architecturally fascinating buildings in various states of decay / vandalism, and has a long history speckled with famous patients such as Hitler and Honecker. What a lovely destination for a day in the snow …
Urbex
A night in The Morgue
Mortuaries are irresistible to freaks like me. I clump them under ‘hospitals’ as an important part of the Urbex Big Five; asylums, hospitals, military, industrial, and religious sites. They’re also few and far between, being either part of an active site or one of the first places to fall victims to looters as soon as they enter a derelict state. My advice? Get in.
Photography, Travel, Urbex
Tour Day 2: Pripyat and Kiev
Photography, Travel, Urbex
Tour Day 1: Chornobyl and Pripyat
Photography, Travel, Urbex
Our arrival in the Exclusion Zone
Day One sees our intrepid adventurers travel to Kiev via London, pass security checkpoints manned by armed guards, and enter the officially designated “Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation” for our most ambitious UrbEx photography project to date. We’ll be spending two and a half days in Chornobyl, mostly visiting the countryside around the power plant and in particular Pripyat, an “atomograd” city for 50,000 inhabitants abandoned since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986.