Drilling Into Success by Robert Combden

Book Publication

Many of you who read my blog may not know but I’ve been employed within the oil industry most of my life. This has included a substantial amount of time working on drilling rigs both offshore and onshore. Many of my photographic opportunities then, have been in and around the drilling locations where I have worked in, and through time I’ve amassed a fair collection of industrial related photographs too.

One of these pictures has been used for a book cover that has just been published. The book is entitled Drilling Into Success which is by Robert Combden. Robert hails from North-eastern, Newfoundland and who like me, has spent most of his life working on drilling rigs. The book details his life as a rig hand and contains anecdotal tales and stories of his life within the oil patch and is written to bring a fuller understanding of the processes of drilling a well and what life is really like on an oil rig.

Robert’s book is available in Chapters, Coles and Indigo stores in Edmonton, Alberta, and Costo, Chapters and Coles in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

As for the picture, well it’s quite an old one, being of late 2004 vintage and around the start of my rekindled interest in serious photography. It was taken with a Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2, which some may remember as an 8 megapixel, fixed lens, bridge camera. It had a 7 times optical zoom  lens with the equivalent of a 28-200mm focal length, an electronic viewfinder and a fold-out rear 1.8-inch rear LCD screen. 8 megapixels was a pretty formidable specification back then, but these days you can get that on a phone. Never-the-less I got achieved some pleasing images with the A2 at the time, although the files were pretty noisy by today's standards. It wasn't long however, before I was smitten by the lure of a Canon 20D and even that seems somewhat old fashioned now.