I love heavy machinery. I guess it’s probably a relic of my time in the sandpit as a child taking my Tonka toys on trails of construction and destruction. The sheer power of these machines and what they’re able to do fascinates me. So, when Epiroc’s team reached out and asked if I’d like to be part of an advertorial for their Mining and Construction Magazine, I simply asked where to sign.
For this assignment, we’d be covering the first Boomer S2 drilling machine to be deployed in Korea. The date was set and the turnaround was quite quick, so I booked myself some bus tickets to Sokcho and headed out to the coast.
As we jumped into the company car and headed over to the mine, I really wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew we’d be underground and that we’d be working in the dark, but I wasn’t prepared for just how deep we’d go. It was hard to tell in the pitch black of the mine. Our headlights only illuminated a portion of the tunnel in front of us and everything else was pitch black.
After ten minutes of driving, I asked “How do you know where we’re going? How far in are we?”. It turned out we were already a couple of kilometres into the mine and were following markers that were easy for those familiar with the mine, but a complete mystery to everyone else in the car. “The Boomer is about 2km ahead,” they assured me.
As the machine came into view, I understood what I was up against. The cavernous mine was lit only by the work lights on the machine, our car headlights, and the headlamps we all had attached to our hardhats. I thanked my lucky stars that I’m living in the time of digital photography. This would have been a much tougher project on film.
Immediately, I started working to the brief. We’d need portraits of the relevant workers, shots of the machine in action, and a sense of the mine. Not only that, but I’d been told that the magazine always liked to turn every shoot into a potential cover shoot. That was music to my ears, so as I began to understand the machine and see the space we’d be working in, I slowly formed an idea for the cover.
We started with some portraits of the staff to get everyone warmed up and rip off the Band-Aid with that one. By the time we were through those, I had everyone on my side and we were ready to get the machine in action. I knew that these would be cropped and used as tiny portraits in the magazine, but I still wanted to get something that could be used for other purposes, so I used the machine as a background for the portraits.
I’d decided to bring along my Godox AD400 as I knew I was going to be lighting some large spaces, but for some of the wider shots, I wished I had a few more lights with me. Not one to be stopped by a lack of equipment, though, I quickly improvised and had the mine staff point the headlights of their cars where I needed some extra light. This leant a grittier, more natural feel to the light rather than the polished feel strobes can sometimes offer, and I was really happy with the results.
When it came to the cover shot, I drew on everything I’d learnt about the machine and how I was going to light the space to create a showpiece for the machine and its owner. I had the shot in mind, but I had a crew of people who wanted to get back to work, so convincing them was the hardest part!
I asked the operator to set the machine in the middle of the path in a simple configuration that he might use to check on the machine and ensure everything was good before starting a job. Once that was in place, we switched on all the lights, put my strobe way down the tunnel to fill the space with light and give the machine a bit of pop. All that was left then was to add some headlights from our cars to illuminate the darker spaces and turn on the operator’s headlamp. For all that work, I landed the cover and couldn’t be happier with how this assignment turned out.
