Why was I walking around at midnight in the middle of a snowfall in Ukraine with my tripod shooting? I just can’t remember. I don’t remember much about the Ukraine and those cold nights. I can’t decide if I repressed them or have selectively forgotten or some delightful combination thereof.
And Ukraine taught me a new level of cold that I thought was reserved somewhere in the nether Dante regions…
Filed under the categories: Kharkov, Musings, Travel, Ukraine
This is very near the center of town in Kharkov, Ukraine. They use these old trams that are absolutely on the edge of breaking down with every creak and groan.
Here is a block of apartments in Kharkov, Ukraine.
This is the lower floor of the office building in Kharkov, Ukraine. The building holds many companies and Program Ace is on the top floors. Once you are actually into the offices themselves, they are perfectly nice and they have sweet broadband… but the entrance area down below could use a coat of paint or two…
This is a place I passed every day when walking from my apartment to Mike’s apartment while in Ukraine. BTW, they now seem to get pretty agitated when you call it "The Ukraine"… just stick with "Ukraine", and it will avoid you some dirty looks, which are not the good kind of looks to get from Ukrainians.
This is a super cool restaurant in Kharkov. I wish I could have gotten a lot more shots, but when a Russian owner glares at you, it’s generally a good idea to put away your camera.
This is what I see every morning on my daunting egress from our apartment in Kharkov.
This is the little public area near the train station.
The train station was across from my apartment in Kharkov. I passed it every morning and every night on the way into the office. It has a class old-Soviet feel and always looked great in the sunset.
When I was in Kharkov, Ukraine, my host drove me up to the Russian border where we visited these mass graves. It was very eerie. This is the site of the Katyn Massacre, where the Red Army executed over 20,000 Polish prisoners, many of whom were senior officers in the military that were captured in 1939.
Those who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and 131 refugees. Also among the dead were 20 university professors (including Stefan Kaczmarz); 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots. In all, the NKVD executed almost half the Polish officer corps.[1] Altogether, during the massacre the NKVD murdered 14 Polish generals. I got this information (and you can get more) at from the Wikipedia page on the Katyn Massacre.
For some reason, the picture of this gal I put up a few days ago got 4x the hits the my usual pictures in the first 24 hours. I don’t understand why people like looking at this stuff instead of landscapes and strange buildings. So anyway, let them eat cake I say…. here is another.
(just kidding…. of course…. glad you like this series)
I told my brother that I was going to the Ukraine. He warned me that the women there were not pretty – short, fat, and hairy were the three admonitions he passed along. I think Kyle learned everything he knows about East European women from the German swimming team in the 1976 Olympics.
I am in the Ukraine (it’s hard to tell from this picture) for work with a software partner there that has about 160 programmers, artists, animators, and other game-development disciplines. It just so happens that Oleg, CEO of this other company, is a famous photographer in the Ukraine. He has more photography equipment than Hefner and Flynt combined. He also has his own photography studio with enough lights to melt Chernobyl (strange segue to my story about Chernobyl).
Oleg and I talk a lot about photography. I’m more into landscapes and unique finds. He’s more into male/female models and having them do things with props and scenes and shaving cream. He invited me to his studio and Saturday and said, “We get models, zerefore we take some pictures.” I had never worked in a studio like his before, so I gave him a big thumbs up.
We showed up at his studio early and spent an eternity as he showed me every light, every strobe, every remote control, and another eternity looking at aperture and lighting and then having a 250-pound Ukrainian man sit in a chair to get the lighting right… Instead of posting a picture of the 250-pound Ukrainian man, I decided to put up this one of the model.
I only speak a few words of Russian, so I let Oleg do all the talking. We snapped away for a while and I got some interesting shots. I have a bunch more that I will post in coming weeks/months.
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