One man’s sorrow is another man’s joy, or so the saying goes (I assume it applies equally to women). And so it is in the Yukon Territory, where oil, gas and precious metal interests have discovered that the Canadian province may hold vast, untapped resources. That’s good news for the economy and perhaps bad news for the environment. We’ll soon see.

In winter I usually review some of my past year’s work and, lo and behold!, I found some images that I had forgotten about. Without taking a stand on Yukon’s oil and gas exploration, on my trip there last summer, I happened to pass an oil exploration camp that is on hiatus right now, while the corporate execs seek additional investors. We needed a break from driving anyway, so my fellow photographer Richard Hartmier (www.hartmier.com) and I stopped for maybe 30 very rushed minutes to make some photo impressions of the drilling equipment lying in wait. I attached some photo info, but I can’t attach comments to these images since I have no idea what each piece of equipment is or does. But, here is a photo essay, uninformed as it is. All images here were taken hand-held on a Nikon D700, then post-processed into B&W using Lightroom 3 and, in a few cases, Nik Silver Effects.

24-70@70mm, 1/500 at f/4.0, ISO 140

24-70@60mm, 1/2000 at f/4.0, ISO 200

24-70@60mm, 1/6000@f/4.0, ISO 200

24-70@70mm, 1/500 @ f/11, ISO 200

24-70@70mm, 1/350@f/11, ISO 200

17-35@25mm, 1/60@f/8.0, ISO 200

17-35@26mm, 1/750@f/5.6, ISO 200