“In school I hated history, but in my later years I’ve come to enjoy it, and be mesmerised by it. I love war documentaries, because I’m just blown away that you can stand in areas of the world today that are calm and quiet, but were once the scenes of untold horrors and killing. Anyway, this isn’t about war but is rather a phenomenal iPad app that takes you inside Chernobyl”

The Long Shadow Of Chernobyl is $6,99, so about the same price as a local magazine in South Africa, but it offers much more than that. It has a 5 Star rating on the app store, so that says a lot.

This is what it’s about:

Photographer Gerd Ludwig, considered one of the leading documentary photographers of our time, introduces his premiere app for the iPad, the most comprehensive photographic coverage of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to date. Spanning nearly two decades of documentation, his groundbreaking work explores the human and environmental impacts since the disaster, including photos from Ludwig’s most recent trip to Chernobyl, taken in early 2011 as the crisis at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant was unfolding.

The Long Shadow of Chernobyl features:

• Four photo galleries, 12 slideshows and two interactive panoramas, for a total of more than 150 photographs (some never before published) of the reactor, the abandoned city of Pripyat, the Exclusion Zone and the victims
• Exclusive behind-the-scenes video of damaged reactor unit No. 4, along with a video introduction by Ludwig, plus two additional videos
• An in-depth look at the world’s worst nuclear disaster to date: Ludwig went deeper inside the reactor than any Western still photographer and returned in 2011 on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the disaster to reenter the reactor
• An essay by Dr. David Marples, renowned expert on Eastern Europe

Search for it on the app store if you have an iPad, it looks fantastic.