Well maybe 52 but who is counting. Well no caving for a while with my " problem " so I took up the suggestion re The MCRA Flickr archive. ( See separate post ). Getting along fine with that and now at about 350 uploads. Hope to reach 1000 one day. All cave stuff of course.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/96466079@N05/

Will drop stuff here from time to time. We can see how cave photography has changed over 50 years and, of course, the caving kit itself. ( ready for a laugh ).

Well that should keep my fan club duo from going cold turkey and annoy those who like looking at the forum on their mobiles.

Photos will come any order any time span. Mostly those I like cus they bring back happy memories from years ago. This could be a long on going post. ( but only if nobody moans ).

I love ancient photos. Can't wait!

The Pitch Daren Cilau.

Not long after the main cave was discovered. Two of us did a recce trip of 13 hours down to the sump. Hadnt a clue where we were going.

This shows me with a ruddy great steel camera box. We wore two nife cells and I dragged that darn box through the cave. I could get all my gear in a suit pocket now.



Trip to photograph The Time Machine. The flash bulbs took up most space in the box. With three of us and just bulb flash we did not achieve much by today's standards. All hand held flash. Cameras on open shutter. " One two three --- fire. Sod it mine never went off --"



Lamb and Fox Chamber. Ogof Draenen.

Most stuff was done pretty much on the move. I still favour that today. If I cant do it in five minutes I rarely bother. Really there was never enough of us to get a lot of light in the big stuff.



Travertine Passage Ogof CAF.



Early days in Reservoir Hole.

One technique I like was to use somebody else s flash. That saved my flash bulbs and was very simple. I have around 500 photos of Pete Rose so he must have 500 of me.



We used Ektachrome slide film. To my mind it gave better colour than Kodachrome. Anything wrongly exposed or " tramlined " was chucked out. We could put all that right today. Once in a while I used a special Agfa Dia Direct monochrome slide film as that gave good black and white images. We very rarely used print film. It never seemed to work.

We photographed a lot of Shatter Cave and Withyhill at the time of discovery. To be honest its odd how few cavers took photos back in the 70's. Most were considered semi professional like Jerry Wooldrige and Paul Deakin. There were hardly any of us amateurs. Peter Glanvill, Pete Rose and I teamed up in the 1960's. We did a lot together and spent hours arguing about who had the best spot to take the photo. The early shots like this one show what has been lost. That straw was broken off many years ago.

Shatter Cave, The Porridge Basin, 1970's.



Pete Rose with his camera in a newly discovered Shatter Cave.



No tapes then so we could tromp about all over the place. There are limits to cave photography now. " Keep behind the tape ". Well you could get a long monopod. We made those wetsuits. Butt joined and taped with Evostick. Ruddy hard French neoprene. Did you know it was developed as an anti asdic covering for submarines. Anyway you got the sheets, patterns and rolls of tape. Oh very sticky fingers and loads of aggro. Of course we did not need them in Shatter Cave but they took sooo much effort to make. Another caver let his nife cell leak on the crutch piece. He let it dry then it got reactivated by sweat. Nearly lost his bollocks. I think those darn nife cells had something to do with submarines as well. Caustic soda. Nasty stuff.

Excellent stuff, TOR; oh, the joys of making (and wearing) one's own wetsuit ? but they were so much better than 'dry grots' (an oxymoron if ever there was one).

Apropos of alkali burns, years ago, getting changed after one trip someone said 'Hey Johnny, you've got a great splodge of mud on your back'. So he reached round to wipe it off, and came away with a handful of blackened sludge that used to be skin, where a big alkali leak had made a hole about 3 inch by two in his back. (It nicely balanced the scars from the acid burns on his front, delivered by leaky lead-acid Oldham.)

Pretty usual triple flash. One two three fire. Jigsaw Passage, Daren Cilau.



I got to love the Welsh Caves. So much more opportunity for photography. All that water on your head in Yorkshire and pokey places on Mendip. ( Though we have some bigger bits now ). I joined the Chelsea Caving Club ( itself an Oxymoron of sorts ).Trevor Knief was a long time member. Made the mistake of caving with Arthur Millet. ( You could never keep up with him ). Mostly did my own thing. I expect the Chelsea barely know I exist.

Trevor and his son Julian at Windy Corner in Draenen about 20 years ago.



Tevor was a policeman but outward bound instructor to the cadets for 7 years. Him and Julian are wearing the cadets wet suits. He got a grant from the police for kit every year so we were never short. The lamps were lead acid Edisons. Ex coal board. You never knew how long they would last. The caustic soda type were in stainless steel cases as the stuff was so corrosive. Electrolyte was sodium hydroxide solution with a bit of lithium added. By changing the electrolyte the batteries lasted years. Mine was over 20 years old. Eventually the contacts in the cover   
broke off but you just put a spring onto the battery terminal. The cables suffered rot so had to be replaced fairly often.

Indiana Highway in Draenen.



Easy to get back lighting with slave fired flash now. This was a one two three fire job.

Gosh look at those boxes over the tape. You would get shot for that today.

Ah, the joys of flash bulbs!  And the days when your roll of film always ran out just when it was impossible to put a new one in...

Keep 'em coming!   

Or you did a whole trip without the roll of film. No names ----

You have lots of fans on here Nick, not just two! Love all your photos, as other peeps have said, 'keep 'em coming', when you can! 

Please give me an indication of how you scan and digitalise slides, I have two slide scanners, they both have their dedicated software which cannot understand cave contrasts.
All my piccis from the '70's and '80's are on slides (one, two, three- FLASH!) , have not managed to digitalise to the quality you have done.

bograt said:

Please give me an indication of how you scan and digitalise slides, I have two slide scanners, they both have their dedicated software which cannot understand cave contrasts.
All my piccis from the '70's and '80's are on slides (one, two, three- FLASH!) , have not managed to digitalise to the quality you have done.

Click to expand...

Take a look at this page Boggy:-

http://www.darfarpc.org.uk/content/view/39/8/

Most of those pics are either scanned prints or slides. You just need to scan 'em, save 'em, then process them through an image editor. Some people use photoshop, I use the Gimp. (which is free!)

I basically optimise the contrast, give them a bit of sharpening, then save them out in your preferred format. (Prob jpg, though png is better for quality retention.)

I scanned in ALL my old prints and slides a few years ago.

Good luck, Regards, Mel.

(PS:- if you want to email me a scan I'll send you back a processed version for you to evaluate.)

Point I was trying to make was the initial scan, what devices and what cost?.
I have some very good processing software but getting it into the box in the first place is not easy, your examples Mel are OK but no serious underground shots.

I will be honest Bograt I bought a slide scanner for ?100 and the cave images were crap. I lost my temper and threw it against the wall. Very Kindly " Sid " of the MCRA offered to scan nearly 700 of my slides and put them on disc. All my old struff here originate from that. I do find though that nearly all of it has to go through Photoshop to improve the image. Relying only on the scan is not enough. Peter Glanvill has two scanners now and seems to be getting along OK. Getting the colour balance from a faded image is the most difficult part.Slides do deteriorate as certain colours go. The teky folk can explain that. Pete Rose has a huge treasure trove of early slides. I went to see him this week and retrieved five boxes for either Peter Glanvill or Sid to scan. The vast collection is in a bit of a pickle and to be honest I lost the will to sort them all out. Will concentrate on the five boxes I have as there are nice ones of me in there. There are many online services for slide scanning that work out at about 35p per slide. Of course you have to pay postage and worry about them getting lost.

In Photoshop I use Crop, Clone and Adjust Smart Fix the most. The latter is good for scanned slides as you can get exposure and colour balance sorted to a general degree quite quickly. For some reason I find that the edit to improve sharpness rarely works well with caving shots though its great for the shipping images I upload to Wrecksite. As with any photo imaging save the original and work on a copy.

Agen Allwedd. Main Passage at Southern Stream.



Getting the big stuff was quite easy with bulb flash on brief time. We used the big PF5 bulbs for this and to make the flashgun work in the dark I had a bit of meccano screwed to it to make a contact to fire.

Today's stuff is technically so much more proficient but takes longer to set up. Personally I dont much care for the super wide distorted images that seem to be in favour.

Daren Cilau. Apocalypse Way.



Jigsaw Passage Daren Cilau.



Pete in the foreground using the same flash to get a different image. We rarely used tripods so there was often a double image or wobbly light syndrome. All rejected back then but could be corrected now in Photoshop.

I am using a Minolta Dimage Elite 500 bought on Ebay. They have stopped making slide scanners so I bought a second one as I have thousands of pics to get through. I scan at a high resolution although OK manipulable quality at about 6 Mb per shot. A cheap Ion scanner I bought only gives I MB images and is not good for quality. You can use software with the scanner but I have found best to post process shots. It's great for getting scratch tramlines and water marks out plus fungi on old slides. I am rescanning some as the quality of scanners has improved and so has my experience.

Thanks for the info OR & MRODOC, I'm toying with the idea of using the old bellows slide copier on a DSLR when I can afford one. :-\

I have one in my attic if you want it. It will fit any SLR with the appropriate adapter. Never thought of trying that but I used to be disappointed with the slide duplicates I made that way even with slide duplicating film which has a lower contrast. Biggest problem was getting the colour balance right and I never mastered it.

I know "night school" courses as was have changed a lot over the last few years but our local adult education centre used to run a digital imaging course that gave access to a decent quality slide scanner. These days the cost of the course may be equal to the cost of buying your own scanner but it could be worth enquiring.