The idea to photograph the famous monument of ancient Russian architecture, the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl, arose spontaneously. I heard on the radio news that a state of emergency had been declared near Ryazan: unprecedented flooding had inundated about 500 houses.
I've already been to the Church of the Intercession filmed From the air in 2010. I asked local friends about the flood situation near Vladimir. They quickly sent me some very promising photos—the meadow we'd hiked through the previous time was flooded right up to the railroad tracks. It became clear we needed to get out there and shoot immediately, before the waters began to recede. A serious problem was the lack of a boat.
Friends told me it was practically impossible to rent a boat on the spot. I described all these difficulties to my companion, Dima Moiseenko, and asked if he was ready to drop everything he was doing (girlfriends and Facebook) and go to Vladimir. Dima was as prepared as a pioneer. The second "pioneer," ready for adventure for the sake of a beautiful shot, was Denis Sinyakov, a staff photographer for Reuters.
We decided to leave immediately, that very night, to be there by dawn. We urgently needed a watercraft. The boat we'd bought online was delivered to Dima's home an hour before departure—around midnight. After three and a half hours of struggling with rough roads and sleep, we arrived at the Bogolyubovo train station. At 4 a.m., the streets were dark and deserted. After several attempts at reading the instructions by the dim light of a streetlamp and brainstorming, we finally assembled the boat and, after dragging it over the railway embankment, ceremoniously launched it. In our haste, we completely forgot about the tradition of breaking a bottle of champagne, which, incidentally, we didn't have.
As promised, there was plenty of water. The fog that had settled over the river made it feel like we were standing on the seashore: nothing but water as far as the eye could see, with no other shore in sight.
Just as we were about to set sail, a group of photographers appeared on the shore. They had plenty of camera equipment and tripods, but they were missing the most important tool for capturing the spill—a boat. The photographers looked at the water, at us, and our boat, sighed, and wandered off into the fog along a railroad embankment. We, however, cast off without delay.
I'll skip the details of our glorious voyage, first through the forest, then across fields and meadows. Just for the sake of completeness, I'll say that of the three participants in the filming, only Denis was wearing waders, and Dima, having sat down to row, admitted after about ten minutes that it was the first time he'd ever done so.
So, after wandering through the foggy channels for about an hour, we spotted the church's dim silhouette just as dawn broke. The sun painted the sky and water with such unreal colors that we almost forgot why we'd come here.
The guys grabbed their cameras, I sat down at the oars, and for about half an hour, the silence was broken only by the clicking of shutters. The photographers were so engrossed that only the threat of misusing the oars allowed me to tear Dima away from the camera's viewfinder and focus on capturing the aerial spheres that you can now see on today's tour...
Source: travel.ru