On the rig, the camera only came out on the easy days.<\/p>\n
Most shifts, I wasn\u2019t \u201cthe photographer.\u201d I was the drilling fluids specialist, the mud engineer who spent fifteen years making sure the well didn\u2019t do anything it wasn\u2019t supposed to (to the best of my ability). My world was numbers on a morning report, viscosity in a marsh funnel, mud weight on a balance, and a constant, low-level awareness that if the fluid system got away from us, everyone on location had a problem.<\/p>\n
There were nights when the pumps never seemed to shut up, gas readings crept higher than I liked, and I lived between the pits and the lab, adjusting properties and double-checking data. On those tours, my cameras stayed tucked in a bag by my bed. Work came first and sometimes work swallowed everything.<\/p>\n
But every so often, a well-behaved well did. The formation played nice, the mud program did exactly what the spreadsheet said it should, and the rig settled into a rhythm that didn\u2019t feel like a fist around your chest. Those were the days when the other part of my brain, the part that has always reached for a camera\u2014finally had room to breathe.<\/p>\n
I took photography gear on every hitch anyway. If the location looked promising when we spotted the rig\u2014big sky, interesting terrain, a farm tucked just beyond the lease road\u2014I\u2019d make sure a few rolls of film and at least one camera made it into my duffel. On night shifts, when the charts were steady and the derrickman didn\u2019t need me, I\u2019d come out with an RB67 Pro S that had no business being that close to drilling mud and try to make sense of sodium vapor lights and steam on 6\u00d77 film. On calmer days, I\u2019d sling a Rolleiflex SL35 or a Canon AE-1 Program over my shoulder and walk the perimeter, treating the blowout preventer stack and substructure like they belonged in a landscape series.<\/p>\n
Some people spend their film on Paris streets or mountain sunrises. I spent mine on iron, mud, and the farms wrapped around the rig road. Film turned a jobsite most people only see in stock photos into a place I could study slowly\u2014one frame at a time\u2014without ever forgetting that my first responsibility was keeping the well under control.<\/p>\n
Rig Life Through a Mud Engineer\u2019s Eyes<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve never worked on a rig, \u201cdrilling fluids specialist\u201d sounds like someone who shows up, checks a few gauges, and leaves. In reality, the mud engineer is glued to the whole operation. Every formation change, every increase in rate of penetration, every hint of gas pushing back from the hole shows up in the pits and on the reports long before it becomes something you can photograph.<\/p>\n
My day usually started well before sunrise, coffee in hand, staring at the mud pits and the morning numbers. Weight, viscosity, gel strengths, fluid loss\u2014they all had to line up with what the well plan expected and what the driller was actually seeing at the bit. If the mud ran too thin, we risked losing control. If it ran heavy or too thick, we could damage the formation or slow the whole operation down. Most of my time was spent in that space between what the office wanted and what the rig could live with.<\/p>\n
That job forces you into a strange split vision. One part of your brain is always doing quiet math: pump strokes, volume changes, density trends. The other is constantly scanning the environment\u2014pit levels, shaker flow, how hard the pumps sound like they\u2019re working. You end up noticing everything because anything might matter.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s exactly the eye I brought to photography on location.<\/p>\n
When I walked around with a camera, I wasn\u2019t just chasing \u201ccool rig shots.\u201d I was seeing the same things I watched as a mud engineer: the way fluid moved across the shakers, the way steam curled off a line on a chilly night, the way the derrick cut the sky into geometric shapes. The blowout preventer stack wasn\u2019t an anonymous piece of hardware to me\u2014it was the last wall between a difficult day and a disaster. Photographing it from low angles, letting it loom in the frame, felt honest.<\/p>\n
Because I lived in that in-between space\u2014between the office and the floor, between the pits and the doghouse\u2014I had time to see the rig as more than just a workplace. On easy days, when the system behaved and the calls from town slowed down, I could let my eyes wander past the gauges and up to the sky, or out across the fields hugging the lease road. Film was just the medium I trusted to bring those observations home with the same weight they had out there.<\/p>\n
Planning Around Easy Days and the Land Around the Rig<\/p>\n
I never treated the rig like a photoshoot. If anything, photography was the reward I dangled in front of myself when the job eased up. That meant I learned to read the rhythm of a well the same way I read the light.<\/p>\n
When we\u2019d move into a new state or county, I\u2019d pay attention long before I loaded the first roll. Some locations were all dust and scrub brush, nothing but brown and beige under a washed-out sky that begged for black and white. Others were set down in the middle of rolling farmland, pivoting sprinklers throwing arcs of water into the evening light, cows drifting along fence lines. In some regions, the way the sky opened up at dusk made me think in color before I ever saw the first negative. In others, the harsh contrast of steel and mud against a flat, gray horizon practically begged for a punchy, forgiving black-and-white film.<\/p>\n
On my days off between tours, I\u2019d mentally scout the next hitch before I even packed my bag. If I knew we were headed to a part of the country with big sunsets and red dirt, a couple rolls of color went into the kit along with my usual monochrome. If it was a place I remembered as flat and bleak, I leaned heavier into black and white. Either way, the cameras came with me every time. The drilling schedule changed, but the habit of taking film to work didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Once we rigged up and settled into a pattern, I started scouting in a more deliberate way. During daylight, when things were quiet and I wasn\u2019t needed, I\u2019d walk the perimeter of the location and look at it like a photographer instead of an employee. I\u2019d note where the flare stack sat in relation to the rig. I\u2019d watch how the shadows from the derrick ladder fell across the substructure in the late afternoon. I\u2019d pay attention to the fields that wrapped around the site\u2014corn one hitch, winter wheat the next, sometimes just a lonely farmhouse sitting back from the road, watching us chew into the earth.<\/p>\n
Those walks were like sketching. I wasn\u2019t firing the shutter yet; I was building a mental map of the frames I wanted to make when the day finally cooperated. On the easy days, when the crew had breathing room and the supervisors weren\u2019t circling like hawks, I knew exactly where I wanted to stand.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when the big RB67 came out at night. I\u2019d line it up on a tripod and try to make something beautiful out of sodium vapor lights, steam, and steel. During the day, the Rolleiflex SL35 or AE-1 Program felt more practical, lighter in the hand as I moved around the location. I\u2019d photograph the blowout preventer stack from low angles, so it looked as monumental and intimidating on film as it felt standing beside it in real life. I\u2019d back up and let the whole rig sit against a sky that changed every hour. And when I stepped off location onto the lease road, I\u2019d turn my attention to the farms and fields that made the rig feel small for a change.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t just about getting \u201ccool oilfield shots.\u201d Planning around easy days and scouting the land turned the rig into an anchor point inside a larger landscape story. The wellhead, the BOP stack, the substructure, they were all just pieces of a bigger frame that included the fields we were cutting through and the people who lived just beyond the fence line. Film slowed everything down enough that I could see all of that at once.<\/p>\n
Choosing Cameras and Film for a Hostile Environment<\/p>\n
The drilling rig was never a friendly place for cameras. Everything out there was designed to be washed down, beaten up, or bolted in place. My gear was none of those things. If I was going to bring film into that environment, it had to earn its right to be there.<\/p>\n
At night, the RB67 Pro S became my main rig camera, partly because it made absolutely no sense. It\u2019s huge, heavy, mechanical, and about as subtle as parking a refrigerator on the catwalk. But the first time I saw a 6\u00d77 frame of the rig under lights, all that weight felt justified. The big ground glass let me really see what the sodium vapor lamps were doing to the steam and the steel. Composing on that screen, with the derrick lines cutting through the frame and the flare stack glowing in the distance, felt closer to setting up a painting than taking a snapshot. Ten shots on a roll meant I couldn\u2019t just spray and hope; every exposure had to be earned.<\/p>\n
On some of those easier days, when the mud numbers were boring and the sky was doing something interesting, that same RB67 left the pad with me. I\u2019d load Velvia 50<\/a>, throw the camera over my shoulder, and start walking the dirt roads that spidered out from the location. Velvia on 6\u00d77 is a different kind of commitment. At ISO 50, you\u2019re not grabbing casual frames\u2014you\u2019re on a tripod, watching the light crawl across the fields, waiting for the moment when the rig, the road, and the land all line up. The color it gave me out there never felt subtle. Red dirt, rusted steel, green crops, and a blue sky all hit the slide like someone had turned the saturation knob past polite and into \u201cthis is what it felt like to stand there.\u201d Those frames are some of my favorites because they sit right on the line between industrial documentary and landscape photography.<\/p>\n Daylight on the pad itself was busier, so I leaned on smaller 35 mm cameras: a Rolleiflex SL35 and a Canon AE-1 Program. Both were simple enough that I could run them on muscle memory after a long shift. I knew where the shutter speed dial lived without looking. I could ride the aperture ring by feel as I moved from the deep shadow under the substructure out into the open lease road. The viewfinders were bright, the shutters sounded like they meant it, and if a camera did take a hit from a stray clump of mud or a careless elbow, I wasn\u2019t sacrificing my entire kit.<\/p>\n Film choice eventually settled into its own quiet routine. The Rolleiflex SL35 almost always wore E100<\/a>. That stock became my way of dealing with clear air and big sky, the kind of locations where sunset hit the side of the rig like a hammer. E100 rendered those evenings with a crisp, almost surgical clarity, the cold blue in the shadows, the warm smear of sodium vapor light, the thin line of color on the horizon where the day was bleeding out. It didn\u2019t flatter everything, but when the light lined up, it made the whole scene feel like it had been etched onto the transparency instead of just exposed.<\/p>\n The Canon AE-1 Program was more flexible by design, and the film I loaded into it reflected that. On some hitches, it lived on Ektar 100<\/a>. Ektar liked the rig more than I expected. It managed rust and red dirt and overcast skies with a kind of saturated stubbornness that matched the place. Steel looked heavy and deliberate, warning signs popped, and the farms wrapped around the location took on this rich, almost postcard quality when the sun dropped low and caught the tops of the crops.<\/p>\n