Photography Showcase 3 per week limit

[pwhole]

The next set I'm going to put up of the rarely-photographed (if ever?) Toadstool Aven in Peak Cavern were done the week before Christmas, and I nearly crippled myself just before taking them, accidentally sliding feet-first 4m down a steep and wet flowstone slope, still holding my camera, and my body was played like a xylophone by every protrusion on the way down. I hit a flat gravel floor, and the SLR flew out of my hand and hit a large rock with a loud crack. It had the flash trigger unit attached on the hotshoe, and no lens cap on, but nothing was damaged, and the camera switched on fine and just worked - incredible.

I felt less good, and was hurting all over, but given the situation it seemed best to crack on and get the hell out before my endorphins wore out. Needless to say a broken leg there would have given the Wales rescue a run for its money, given the amount of bang and time that would have been required to enlarge Cohesion Crawl enough (100m) to get me out. The return trip along the crawl with an inflexible rope bag holding two Peli 1400s was pure hell, and very noisy on my part. However, as part of the overall deal, I had promised my glamourous assistants a trip to Moss Chamber just next door (ironically), so we still did that afterwards, and then I finally was able to limp out and check my injuries before the evening carol concert locked us in.

So these really were earned

 

[pwhole]

Toadstool Aven, Peak Cavern

Thanks to Brennan and Chloe for the help.

Technical details:

Pentax K20 digital SLR (the tank)
2 X Cactus RF60X flashguns
Cactus V6 flash trigger
Adobe Camera RAW, Photoshop, and the APF-R plugin.

 

[Paul Marvin]

Lovely Phil

 

[chunky]

Great set of photo's, made even more so when you know the back story of the effort to take them. [emoji106]

Sent from my SM-A715F using Tapatalk

 

[Andrew N]

Nowhere near as good as most of the photos on this thread, but here's a photo from the bottom of Titan taken with an iPhone 13 Pro.

 

[Paul Marvin]

Nowhere near as good as most of the photos on this thread, but here's a photo from the bottom of Titan taken with an iPhone 13 Pro.

Andrew darken it a bit then pick out some highlights and it will look different again . Trust me

 

[Badlad]

Taken with my relatively new S21 Galaxy

 

[chunky]

Camera phones are awesome, they are certainly changing the way documenting is happening underground, they are coming on leaps and bounds year on year....wonder how much longer I'll feel the need to lug around the heavy and expensive kit for [emoji848]

Sent from my SM-A715F using Tapatalk

 

[Paul Marvin]

Camera phones are awesome, they are certainly changing the way documenting is happening underground, they are coming on leaps and bounds year on year....wonder how much longer I'll feel the need to lug around the heavy and expensive kit for [emoji848]

Sent from my SM-A715F using Tapatalk

Yes but yours are a class apart buddy !

 

[pwhole]

Andrew, sorry for the impertinence, but I couldn't resist having a go as it's a fabulous shot  :-[

 

[Paul Marvin]

Andrew, sorry for the impertinence, but I couldn't resist having a go as it's a fabulous shot  :-[

Phil I so much wanted to do it but didn't , its bloomin brilliant now and it wasn't a lot was it ? 

 

[pwhole]

Ten minutes with a damp rag and some Brasso

 

[Fulk]

Andrew, sorry for the impertinence, but I couldn't resist having a go as it's a fabulous shot  :-[

Phil I so much wanted to do it but didn't , its bloomin brilliant now and it wasn't a lot was it ? 

Well ? I also had a bash at 'improving' this picture, but my effort wasn't as good as pwhole's (glad I didn't post it!) ? nice one, pw. 

 

[Andrew N]

Andrew, sorry for the impertinence, but I couldn't resist having a go as it's a fabulous shot  :-[

I love it Phil! Thanks for taking the time. Interesting to see what can be done, even with a phone shot! I do have a 'proper' camera but I've never bothered to take it into a cave yet, and it's never really occurred to me to try fixing up a phone photo - I must see if the iPhone can shoot in raw - I'm sure it will be able to.

Maybe I should go back through some of my older 'crappy phone shots' and see if I can improve them. Or start taking the DSLR into caves. It's all getting out of hand, this, I'll need another Daren Drum for all my cameras, video equipment, etc...

 

[pwhole]

It begins...

Haha, yep, I'm still very much in the 'old school' of DSLRs and all its attendant hassle and effort - don't make me get the large-format camera out! But for me, lens diameter still clinches the deal in terms of image sharpness, but let's not go there in this thread!! Shooting in RAW is definitely a bonus for shots like this as the latitude for alteration is much higher, due to the higher bit-depth. Although yours was a standard JPEG, Photoshop has a 'Camera RAW' filter that exposes most of the functionality for 8-bit images - such as 'Clarity' and 'De-haze', both of which came in very handy on this image! But to be honest the majority of work (as in all my photos), is just old-fashioned manual 'dodging and burning' exactly as was standard in darkroom printing. Camera RAW allows you to modify this with a brush, and any parameter (like contrast or saturation) can be 'brushed' onto the image - it's very powerful, yet incredibly simple.

 

[Andrew N]

Phil, having never been in a darkroom in my life I've just looked up 'dodging and burning' on Wikipedia ... all I can say is I'm glad that we have Lightroom and Photoshop now!

Thanks again for the image, Gracie loves it too!

 

[pwhole]

Hours just fly by when you're dodging and burning! Some photographers, who had to do this on a mass scale for editions and needed fidelity across the set, often made permanent 'dodging' screens using layers of acetate cut into 'contour maps' of increasing thickness to automatically reduce or increase light transmission to the print, and then mounting these in the enlarger head so the exposure was now a constant time - 'analog' macros!

I also used to enjoy using a two-bath develop, with a long time in a very, very dilute solution, and then a very short time in a regular solution (with the print turned face-down to prevent fogging). This essentially allowed highlights that would ordinarily be bleached out in a normal development to progressively gain detail and slightly darken past paper-white; and then dropping it into the regular-strength bath would bring out the shadows and midtones in literally seconds. But essentially it was extending the dynamic range of the paper, giving 'analog' (or chemical) HDR, as it were.

 

[Paul Marvin]

Hours just fly by when you're dodging and burning! Some photographers, who had to do this on a mass scale for editions and needed fidelity across the set, often made permanent 'dodging' screens using layers of acetate cut into 'contour maps' of increasing thickness to automatically reduce or increase light transmission to the print, and then mounting these in the enlarger head so the exposure was now a constant time - 'analog' macros!

I also used to enjoy using a two-bath develop, with a long time in a very, very dilute solution, and then a very short time in a regular solution (with the print turned face-down to prevent fogging). This essentially allowed highlights that would ordinarily be bleached out in a normal development to progressively gain detail and slightly darken past paper-white; and then dropping it into the regular-strength bath would bring out the shadows and midtones in literally seconds. But essentially it was extending the dynamic range of the paper, giving 'analog' (or chemical) HDR, as it were.

Those were the days Phil, best for me underwater is I can see my mistakes straight away and can have more attempts, I remember always running out of film and then seeing something special 

 

[Cantclimbtom]

I listened to Willy Ronis talking at an exhibition of his work (back in mid 90's) and he also showed some of the cameras he was using at the time. I was behind 20 other  people and struggling to hear/see. But the cameras he was using had a fairly primitive turret setup of 2 or 3 pretty stubby/narrow lenses, a bit like a microscope so he could twist round to the lense he wanted. What I noticed was at no time was it ever a nerd talk of the technical side of cameras or lenses and bodies and the like.

It was predominantly about what he was feeling and trying to capture in the composition (which was often spur of the moment) and also some consideration of the printing. Even though a lot of his work was for magazines (so he could send the film for someone else to develop/print) he enthusiastically discussed printing/developing too.

Sadly I'm not gifted or skilled with photography, but I do notice discussion nowadays seems biased to the technicalities of equipment taking the pics rather than the thinking just before or the work afterwards. So reading the darkroom discussion (and digital equivalent) with great interest

 

[The Old Ruminator]

Andrew, sorry for the impertinence, but I couldn't resist having a go as it's a fabulous shot  :-[

Shows that nowadays the photo work is mainly in the editing. No harm in that.