Industrial Photography: Photographing a Mines Rescue Training Class

As an Experienced Industrial Photographer, I got to spend the day photographing a class in state-of-the-art Mines Rescue training facilities in Singleton

The facility is equipped with areas that incorporate height towers, confined space areas, world-leading virtual reality technologies, and an underground gallery.

The underground training gallery seems to go on forever, it is located beneath the Mines Rescue station. The class is able to use the gallery as a mock environment to practice scenarios in a similar environment to a dark coal mine.

Creative use of cap lamps and fast lenses are some of the requirements for this type of work. I have used flashlights in some of these images but it’s super important to make it not noticeable otherwise it totally spoils the image, I much prefer to, and often bounce multiple cap lamps off a white reflector for fill light (so there is still detail in the shadow areas)

I don’t carry a tripod with me anymore (I did when I first started doing this style of photography), most of it is “as it happens”, by the time I set up a tripod, even if my camera is on the tripod, it’s already happened 🙁 I am able to hand hold down to a fairly low shutter speed and I actually like the blur from people moving, I think it adds to the atmosphere of the image.