Other caving things
Photography
When someone asks you to describe caving that’s quite a difficult thing to do, it’s dark, wet, cold, pretty and really cool. Unless your good with words there’s no better way of describing caving to people than through photography. Of course, you could just google caving or Robbie Shone on your phone and show them the image results, but this isn’t quite as fun as taking your own caving photos.
Most people take for granted how easy it is to take photographs on a modern digital camera. Unfortunately, caves lack the abundance of photons required for these cameras to function properly underground. While it is possible to get decent results with a normal digital camera and I’ll go into how later. To get the best cave photographs it’s worth investing in some flash guns.
Why use flashguns?
Flashguns allow you to produce light away from your camera preventing your photos from having a foggy haze to them. They give you a more controllable and even spread of light. If required, they can produce orders of magnitude more light than if you were just using helmet lights, meaning your photographs will be crisp and sharp. With more light, you can afford to do things like lower your shutter speeds freezing waterfalls and rivers. With flashguns, you can also create contrasting shadows that offer a sense of depth to your photographs. But all this comes at a cost.
Firstly, a financial cost, a decent flashgun will set you back about £30 and for good cave photographs you’ll want at least 2 and ideally 3 of them, it’s also worth buying decent rechargeable batteries for them so an extra £20-30 for good AA batteries. Then there’s the extra time it will cost you to 1. Get good at flash photography underground and 2. Faff about with lots of kit before, during and after the caving trip. But if this hasn’t deterred you and you want to find out more then keep reading.
To use your flashguns efficiently you’ll want them to illuminate at the exact same time your shutter opens. This is nearly impossible to do by hand unless you’re using longer shutter speeds which you’ll want to avoid as it will take longer for your camera to process the images after each shot wasting both your battery and time. Instead, you’ll want to get hold of some flash slaves, these send a signal from your camera to your flashguns in order to set off your flashgun at the same time your stutter opens.
There are two types of flash slaves, optical and radio. Optical flash slaves are triggered by light from other flashguns, so a typical set up would be to have a flash gun on your camera which triggers the rest of your flashguns through optical flash slaves. But you don’t want your on-camera flash gun as this will lead to your photos having a terrible foggy haze covering them
Make a table with all the things a cave photographer requires + their costs and
Surveying
Brendan’s beginner survex guide original version here
Conservation
Digging
Other useful links
Training resource: caving guide Recommend books: alpine caving techniques, the black book
General advice about running a club – refer to Rostams guide
Huts –and table of with links to each hut website booking page in the description
Permits and keys, information on how to gain access to peak cavern, and different caves in south wales.
Rigging guides and Descriptions – for the dales, guides for Peak cavern too – redraw to avoid copyright issues, proofread nats copy of rigging without tears.
Guide books – talk about, not for the faint hearted, northern caves ask about south wales caves
Other general stuff
Where to buy kit
UK caving
New to caving