Sweaty Palms II

Twenty months have passed since I gave you this video of some young gentlemen doing some pull ups. From a crane. Several million metres above Paris.

Now, it appears that the Russian youth are at it as well.

According to PetaPixel:

If you’re afraid of heights you may want to look away, and you should certainly never make friends with these daredevil photographers from Russia. We here in the U.S. have memes, young Russian photographers, it seems, have “skywalking”: the newest extremely dangerous photography fad to hit the Internet.

Skywalking basically involves a photographer making his way up to a death-defying height, and snapping a photo that’s meant to give you both a perspective you’ve never seen before, and that feeling like your stomach just made its way into your throat.

And that post links through to Russian photographer Vadim Mahorov’s photoblog, which has an awesome mix of “skywalking” pictures for you to Luke at (geddit?!?) and some great Urbex stuff as well, à la Silent UK.

Prepare to lose PLENTY of time having a look at the rest of the site – it really is full of amazing examples of urban photography.

Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses

More lighthouse stuff, via @ChrisRoperZA.

Does exactly what it says in the title.

lh2Dmitriy Vyacheslavovich lighthouse, Taymyroslavich Peninsula*

Some explanation:

…the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a chain of lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been erected. They had to be fully autonomous, because they were situated hundreds and hundreds miles aways from any populated areas. After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses.

Some great photos and handy hints for rogue states and terrorist groups on where to find unguarded plutonium.

Everybody wins. Happy days.

* completely made up.