It was exactly 01:23:45 AM (UTC+3) on 26 April 1986 when reactor #4 at the Chernobyl plant, near Pripyat in the former U.S.S.R., exploded and sparked a chain reaction ending up with what we know today as the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history. A huge plume of highly radioactive fallout, 400 times more than during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Wikipedia), was exploded into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. But 23 years later, for Swiss decay photographer Timm Suess the Chernobyl ground-zero is also the stuff dreams are made of. At least his dreams.

Like Stalker in Tarkovsky's sci-fi masterpiece, filmed 7 years before the Chernobyl disaster, Suess takes us to a stunning photo-journey into one of the most horrific, abandoned and destructed areas on the surface of earth. While the "Zone" parts in Tarkovsky's fiction film where shot at a deserted hydro power plant on the Jägala river near Tallinn, Estonia, Suess' Chernobyl Journal is an overwhelming HDR photo documentary project chronicling a two-day trip taken in March 2009 through the real thing – the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Packaged into an online presentation on Suess' website, the must see collection includes approx. 450 photographs as well as a few short videos. Below are a few samples we find particularly interesting.

The Road to Chernobyl



Road towards Chernobyl town, still outside the zone (Source). More from this set, including pictures taken in the town of Chernobyl nearby Suess base camp, here.

Red Forest



Panorama of the Chernobyl power plant, view from the railway bridge (Source). More from this set, taken around the Red Forest area near Pripyat, Chernobyl, here.

Pripyat Center



The Pripyat city administration building. The radioactivity sign was probably placed there after the accident (Source). More from this set, taken in the city square of the ghost town of Pripyat west of Chernobyl, here.

Apartment Building



Another corridor in an apartment block in the ghost city of Pripyat near Chernobyl (Source). More from this set, taken around an apartment block in the ghost town of Pripyat near Chernobyl, here.

Amusement Park



The Ferris wheel in the ghost town of Pripyat near Chernobyl (Source). More from this set, taken around the amusement park in the ghost city of Pripyat near Chernobyl, here.

Swimming pool



The public swimming pool in the ghost town of Priypat near Chernobyl (Source). More from this set, taken in a public swimming pool in the ghost town of Pripyat near Chernobyl, here.

School Greenhouse



Greenhouse of a school in the ghost town of Pripyat near Chernobyl (Source). More from this set, taken in and around the greenhouse of school #1 in the ghost town of Pripyat near Chernobyl, here.

Ship Graveyard



Liquidator boats at the ship graveyard north of Chernobyl (Source). More from this set, taken in the North of Chernobyl, where the old liquidator ships went to die, here.

Around Reactor Island



Cooling tower of the unfinished Chernobyl reactors 5 and 6 (Source). More from this horrifying and thrilling set of pictures from and around the Chernobyl Reactor Island, including reactors 1-4 and unfinished reactors 5 and 6, here.

For more see Chernobyl Journal:
http://timmsuess.com/chernobyl-journal/

Look it's the Terminator. Well, actually it's me. Looking like a scary terminator. See the video here.

Be the star in a movie. Choose between The Terminator, Back to School, Dodgeball, City Slickers, Office Space, or Robocop.

(thanks Jerry)

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Delving into the female form and erotica yet claiming to avoid sexual context, Scramateurs by Laurence Taylor is a set of 6 digitally retouched images based on women photographs that had either been taken by themselves or by someone they knew. Taylor then focuses on the sexiest part of his subject's personal image, cutting off all excess parts. Then, through the use of distortion techniques, a theme that is used extensively throughout his work, Taylor takes the sexiness away, or in his own words to CultCase:

"denying the viewer of what was at one point a very enjoyable, erotic image."

So, even though we are not 100 percent sure about how really "not erotic" the set really is, but we do feel Scramateurs is a powerful para-sexual and enjoyable creation. The photo set below is curtsy of Laurence Taylor and published with permission of the artist. You may enjoy it the way you see right / your religion allows (...) but please be nice and check with Laurence before copying it.


The Couch


The Belt


The Pants


The Pit


The Teeth


The Grope

More from Laurence Taylor on Flickr

Did you know that not all spiders build webs to catch their prey, and some do not build webs at all? Designed to be used as traps, spiderwebs are of nature's most sophisticated devices and are built by spiders out of a special silk extruded from their spinnerets. Insects get trapped in spiderwebs and then eaten, providing nutrition to the spider. The tensile strength of spider silk is greater than the same weight of steel and has much greater elasticity. Spiderweb structure is constantly being researched for potential industrial applications. Two examples are bullet-proof vests and artificial tendons (Wikipedia).

Above: A spiderweb in our garden.
Photo by CultCase. High-res here.

We recently featured an image on the Coroflot Member Gallery, of a folding knife Juan Cagampang did for Gerber. It's a pretty sweet little chunk of hardware, with an elegant curve to its spine, some gently technical-looking structure in the handle, and a striking, perfectly circular hole that forms the pivot.

It's also a statistical phenomenon: in the three days since it went up on the Featured page, it has garnered 51 total Likeys, 37 of which it received in the first 24 hours. This puts it in some rarified company, already in the top 100 most-loved images of all time on the site, and well on its way to the front page: this morning, in its third day post-featuring, it was still the fourth most beloved image of the previous 24 hours.

If this kind of statistical attention seems a little obsessive, that's because my job includes staring at these numbers for an hour or more every day. Anomalies like Juan's stand out as sharply as a lone tree in a field of brush and shrubs. They also point to a certain maturity in the Likey system. When it was established back in October of 2008, the intention of the Likey was twofold: to encourage greater engagement in the Coroflot community by its members, and to create a tool for identifying exceptional work. The first was achieved as soon as the first users hit the little rectangular button on their screens.

The second requires a certain volume of responses to really come into its own -- only in the past month or so has the density of Likeys gotten high enough to become a useful tool of discovery. Juan's knife is a good example. Full disclosure compels me to mention that he and I worked together for a few days doing concept development for an electronics project back in 2006, and so I was slightly reluctant to pick this particular image for featuring. But out of the 300-400 images that get featured every month, only a handful get followed by such a wave of Likeys, so this does a lot to justify the selection on its own merits, and indicates something much more powerful than the approval of a small number of website editors; something nearer to universal appeal.

With this in mind, it's useful to go back through some of Likey's Greatest Hits, and start looking for patterns. For all its early popularity, Juan's knife is still just barely in that top 100; it's tied at 94th, in fact, with Flavio Carvalho's electrifying police car illustration:

Here are the all time top five, so far:

Martin Ansin's THX 1138 poster (121 Likeys)

Erik Arlen's Nike footwear concept sketch (122 Likeys)

The "At Your Command" lighting concept from DANIEL LOVES OBJECTS! (125 Likeys)

Miso Soup Design's K Workstation rendering (142 Likeys)

and in the lead since December of 2008, Oliver Rosito's Zero Mouse concept (146 Likeys)

There's enough diversity in this collection to keep me from making any pronouncements about what attracts that sort of love, but I will invite readers to start looking through the Gallery with a similarly critical eye, and perhaps we can start a conversation about it when I get back from vacation.

The thrilling conclusion of the Portland Confab panel. Some highlights to watch for in the second half include:

- Stories of finding great designers in unexpected places: Beth Sasseen discovers a shoe designer through an online discussion board; Kirk James finds a tremendous sketch artist because of his mandolin-building hobby
- The specific abilities needed to be a notebook computer designer
- The advantages of maintaining a long-term database of potential hires
- The necessity of presenting a true picture of your skills and personality, even if it's not what the employer's looking for -- an interview that doesn't result in a job with one firm can turn into a valuable referral somewhere else
- The difference between skill sets for staff positions and freelance ones

That's it for Portland. Leave comments if you can, by the way: San Francisco's Confab is in the planning stages right now and we're looking to make it even better.

An ambulance crew dispatched to the apartment of an 84 year old man in the city of Ramat Gan in Israel, found him lying on his stomach amid filth in his living room. Maggots and blue death marks were all over the body that was already cold. There was also no pulse or breathing or other life signs and there could be no mistake about the strong putrid smell in the apartment. In other words, the man was dead. So, after a doctor arrived to the scene and examined the body he signed the death certificate shown in the above photo.

But as the saying goes, it ain't over till it's over. A few minutes later, when the body evacuation crew was waiting for the CSIs to complete their documentation process, a policeman came near to the "corpse" and could see it is, well... moving his hand. The paramedics were called back, and the man was taken, conscious, to Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer. Naturally, until the recommendations of the special investigation team that had been set up following the incident are issued, the team that declared the man dead was suspended from all medical activity.

We're relived.

Via JPost and Ynet
Photo by paramedic team member Berale Yaakobovitch, via Ynet

As promised, the panel discussion from Portland's Creative Employment Confab is online -- the first half of it, anyway. Panelists, from left to right, are as follows: me, moderating; Chelsea Vandiver, head of Ziba's Communications Design Group; Nick Oakley, lead industrial designer for Intel's Mobile Platforms; Beth Sasseen, senior creative recruiter for Nike; and Kirk James, creative director at Cinco Design.

This first half of the discussion, around 28 minutes long, holds some particularly useful insights on the creative hiring process, notably:

- Where creative talent-seekers look for leads on new hires
- What a portfolio can't show
- The dangers of relying too much on a single source of referrals
- How creative teams in large corporations deal with official hiring channels
- Finding the narrative in an applicant's work history and online presence

Hope you find it useful. Part two goes up shortly.