Two days before going on a caving trip to Hungary, we decided to buy an Olympus TG 5 . . . we really should have bought it sooner and given ourselves time to practise with it. I took a few snaps round the house and garden the day we bought it, and was quite pleased with the quality of the results.
Our first trip in Hungary was to Matyas Hegyi Barlang, part of the show cave that runs under Budapest.
We tried taking pictures by caving light on the P(rogramme) setting, with some modest degree of success; my lamp has both spot and diffuse settings, and on the spot the colours went a bit to pot, being somewhat of a yellowish hue. On the diffuse setting, however, the pictures came out more as expected, with a sort of brownish hue (plus, of course, they were more evenly lit).
Our second caving trip was to Pal-Volgyi Barlang, which is another part of the same cave ? but with bigger passages and less strenuous. We tried the same technique as before for our photography, again with modest results.
A day or two later we set off for the B?kki Mountains, where we stayed in a caving club hut. It?s quite a nice hut (notwithstanding the lack of running water and electricity), in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere, with a splendid long-drop khazi out back (bats for boys, hearts for girls).
In the hut we started to faff with the camera, to try and discover some way of setting off remote flashes; we found that by taping red insulating tape over the camera?s built-in flash, we could fire remote guns with a minimum of foreground lighting. The camera has an aperture-priority setting, but it is restricted to just three f-stops ? f/2, f/2.8 and f/8 ? so to get the correct exposure involved a bit of faffing, setting off aperture against ISO setting.
Our third trip was to Ariadne Cave, which is situated a few miles to the NW of Budapest, where we tried the technique outlined above.
When we got home we made a little open-sided cardboard box with a hole cut in it, and covered the hole with two layers of ?infra-red filter? (old film, not exposed but developed) such that when slipped over the camera the IR filter covered the built-in flash. This then fired off-camera flash(es) in synchronization. It sounds naff . . . it looks naff . . . but it works! To focus, we relied on the camera?s auto-focus mechanism with a caving light trained on the subject, in the hope that the flash would overpower the ?available light?.
Conclusions
We have an A4 printer, so I decided to pick a couple of ?portrait? images shot above ground in good lighting, cut out the central sections of them, and print these sections up at A4 ? thus giving the equivalent of A3 prints. The results were, in my opinion, excellent ? especially when you consider that the camera is, when all is said and done, a point-&-shoot compact (albeit quite a sophisticated one).
So far we?ve made small prints and A4s, plus we?ve included quite a few (up to ~A4) in a Photobook. The TG 5 gives good, clear pictures, with excellent colour rendition. The current screen-saver on my computer is a cropped ~18.75" ? 10.5" (equivalent to a 18.75" ? 14.1") picture taken underground on the TG 5, with a minimum amount of ?tweaking? (minor changes to shadows and highlights, plus a modest degree of sharpening), and it looks fine at this scale, even when seen quite close up.
One limitation of the camera for underground use is the limited range of f-stops; another is the lack of a ?B? setting ? though I guess to some extent the live composite setting could be used as a quasi-B setting?
