Aerial Photo Shoot
Category: Local... Oil & Gas... Photography...
Posted Friday, August 25, 2006 at 09:35 AM [GMT-6]

As I implied in the previous post, I had the privilege of doing an aerial photo shoot yesterday, the first time I'd done such a thing. It was a lot of fun, good experience, and I think the results were good (although the client will have the final word in that regard).

We departed from Midland's Skywest airfield mid-afternoon and headed south about 30 miles, toward a well site just north of Rankin where preparations were underway for a frac job (for the uninitiated, "frac" refers to "hydraulic fracturing"; this is a technique whereby liquid -- sometimes millions of gallons -- is pumped into the underground producing formation at pressures high enough to split the rock, thereby increasing the production of the well). We were asked to get aerial shots of the equipment on location.

The skies were mostly clear and winds were blessedly light, but the air was a still a little bumpy and it was very hot, in the mid-90s. The pilot, my friend Tommy, did such a good job of getting us to the location that we actually thought we were off course, because when it came time to look for the site, we couldn't see it -- because it was precisely below us. We made four passes at about 4,000' and I put the burst mode of my Canon digital SLR to good use, taking more than a hundred photos during the relatively brief periods that I had a clear shot through the open window and past the wing and strut of the Cessna 172.

My new 70-200mm zoom lens performed admirably. I put the camera in shutter-priority mode, setting the shutter speed to 1/1000 and varying the ISO between 200 and 400. At speeds of around 70 mph, there's plenty of buffeting through the open window, but those combinations were sufficient to make any evidence of camera shake insignificant in the resulting photos. And even though the conventional wisdom said to put the camera into manual focus at infinity, I got better results with Canon's autofocus.

So...what were the results of the shoot? Well, I can't show you the actual well site; those photos belong to the client, who hasn't yet seen them. But here's a photo of a windmill I took while we were banking to make another run:

As an interesting footnote that gives you an idea of the "community of Midland," my pal Wallace will be doing the same shoot today. As the logistics worked out, my pilot wasn't available today and his wasn't available yesterday. I expect he'll have his own report up over at Streams at some point.

Oh, and in case you're wondering about the top photo, the pilot's wife accompanied us on the trip.

Update: As promised, Wallace has his report up over at Streams. I'd link directly to it but his permalinks seem to have a hitch in their giddyup. Just look for the August 25th entry.

Technorati tags: Aerial Photography | Frac Job