As some of you know, I recently started a very exciting new contract as the official photographer for BHP Billiton’s northern mining operations.  This is in many ways a dream assignment for me, as it’s not often that you have the creative license – and time – on a commercial shoot to just “go and get cool pictures”.  My first trip up to the Ekati Diamond Mine about a month ago was filled with a couple of firsts:  first time photographing aerials and first time venturing truly underground (to capture some very challenging, but ultimately successful) images of big, impressive machinery “doing their thing” in the pitch black.

This particular blog post is the start of a series that I’ll post highlighting some of my favourites from this ongoing assignment…and it starts, like my initial trip, with some aerial photographs.  For you photogs out there, the key to tact sharp aerials from a heavily vibrating aircraft?  Shutter-speed priority on your camera combined with a lens manually focused to infinity:  for these I set my camera body to about 1/4000th of a second, ensuring that no matter how hard the vibration the image would be sharp.  I have no clue if this is the “officially recommended technique”, but it worked for me

After I got bored taking standard wide-angle shots, I mixed it up with a few fisheye lens images.  I think they were my favourites….gave a nice “mine on the top of the world” effect.

Tags: BHP, Billiton, Diamond Mine, Ekati, images, mine, mining, Northwest Territories, photographs, photography, photos

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under Commercial and Corporate, Landscape and Places. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.