Today's photo is of the recording setup for an lvl shot somewhere in the jungle of brunei inland from Seria. The crew member in the red overalls in the background is most probably checking the connection of some component of our spread – either a geophone or an explosives connection. They guy in the foreground is standing by the triggering device watching the monitors.
The triggers had not one big red button but two! They were set sufficiently far apart that you couldn't press both with one hand and both had to be pressed at the same time to complete the circuit to the detonator to blow the charge. These triggers also had to initiate the recording device so we had an accurate start signal in order to measure the time it took the the sound energy to arrive at each geophone on the spread. If the setup had a fault you could blow the charge and not capture the trigger signal or trigger everything and not record the geophone signals so there was lots of checking and double checking before each shot was taken.
The seismograph is the same one seen in the back of the Isuzu Trooper in the LVL shot along the side of the road. to the right of that is an oscilloscope for checking the line and behind that the lid of the seismograph in which there's a folder labeled ‘lvl Explosives' – our record of what we used where so we could account for all the charges we drew from the magazine. Behind the lid of the seismograph is an aluminum, military style, water canteen. We'd put these in a chest freezer the night before so they were solid blocks of ice when we set off in the morning. That helped both ration our water through the morning as well as keep the water cool into the early afternoon. Warm water on a hot and humid day is NOT refreshing. The two white boxes are batteries while the red box lower right is the lid of the trigger.
None of this stuff was designed for easy portability. The batteries are roped to some plywood boards and the plywood boards have homemade harnesses fashioned from old fire hoses. The plywood boards were less painful against the back than just the aluminum boxed battery. You can also see an old fire hose tied to the trigger box so that could also be carried over the shoulder. The seismograph was the most awkward to carry. The crew members preferred to carry the explosives because we had a proper backpack for those. Plus, that load got lighter as the day went on. Of course, I rarely carried anything.
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