Brian Zinchuk Publishing

This shoot was a follow up of one I did earlier this year for Canadian Advanced ESP. They make electric submersible pumps as well as horizontal pumps for water handling. (Click here or on the photo above to be taken to the gallery)

The assignment this past spring was to do a virtual tour of their shop in Estevan, as well as a single HPS skid package built by Brent Gedak Welding, also of Estevan. They wanted something to show at the Global Petroleum Show in Calgary in June. The virtual tour was loaded onto a laptop, I believe, for display in their booth.

Later this summer they asked for a follow up shoot of a dual HPS skid package. Apparently they liked the first shoot enough to follow up with a second. It took a while to get all the ducks in a row, but this is the result.

I did some exterior shots in the daylight during the golden hour. But the main focus is the interior. I have to say that the folks at Brent Gedak Welding and Canadian Advanced ESP had it spotless when I arrived. The only dust in the building was what came in on my boots!

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The trouble with shooting during the daylight was the mixed lighting and lack of sharp contrast. I found from the previous shoot that using strobe lights at night made the red really jump out and provided consistent colour and sharp contrast. As a result, I did most of this shoot at night, after sundown. I spent several hours crawling over the skid, getting every conceivable angle I could think of.

The centrepiece of this shoot are the three 360 degree panoramas which can be found at www.zinchuk.ca/CAESPDUAL/. They were added to the initial tour under the headings “Dual HPS 1 2 and 3.”

The first is shot from the centre of the skid, the others at each end. There are numerous popup photos showing details or alternate angles of items like valves, piping and motors.

The addition of the three scenes to the original tour meant some editing of the spooling, test bench and HPS skid scenes to provide links to the new scenes.

Virtual tours like this are rapidly becoming a specialty of mine, and they seem to be in high demand. I use a $1000 tripod head, nodal rail and L-bracket setup to ensure I have the millimetre-accuracy needed for it all to line up. The result is 22 or so 16 megapixel photos all merged into one. That is then reduced in size to be manageable for web viewing. The result it a fully panable and zoomable virtual tour that you can show a client anywhere using the iPhone in your pocket.

The highlight was when I dropped off the thumb drives with the final product. Apparently they were “giddy in Edmonton” when they saw it. It made my day.