About the trip

Although I didn’t take very many photos on our last weekend trip into Elk River, I wanted to share a couple more of them with you. Last week I talked about getting shots of Sandy coming through sumps 2 and 3 and the difficulty of staying ahead of the silt to get a shot through clear water. On the same trip I was also keen to get a shot in the first downstream sump. Jim Arundale was the first person to pass sump 1. Over a number of attempts he pushed his way through the short underwater distance to the other side. The most pertinent feature of the first sump isn’t the length though, it’s the height. The fact that I can fit the camera housing through means that the sump is at least 28cm high – but I’d be very surprised if it was much more than that.

About the dive

The dive through sump 1 can therefore be a bit exciting. After a crouching, crawling and roof sniffing journey from the gearing up spot down the stream, there’s a nice pool to stand in and put your tanks back on. Once prepared you kneel in the water, grab the line firmly in one hand, and wedge yourself into the flattener. Forward progress comes from wriggling on your belly and pushing with your toes against the roof and floor. The rock feels like flowstone and the ridges you can see there have a nasty tendency to grab at gear and hold you back.

Being a streamway, it’s also as silty as you would expect. If we haven’t spent too long standing in the mud and gearing up the first person through may see something, but the ones after that definitely don’t. This sump is a difficult dive, and getting the housed camera through can be interesting. So getting the camera in the right position to take some photos while in there, and have them show anything at all, sounded like a challenge. I have seen a photo from sump one taken looking forward into the clear water in front of the diver. What I really wanted to take though was a photo with a diver in it. Given the impossibility of sending two divers through together, or having any clear water between them, the only option left was self-portrait.

About the photo

The photo above is one of two that had clear water in them. As I was holding the camera at arm’s length in front of me I could see that it was in clear water…through the silt that was in front of my face. I would inch forward against the rock, and the silt moved with me for the same net result. I discovered that I needed to have my head down and sideways to fit through, which didn’t help with getting a face in the picture or with seeing where the camera was up to. I used both hands to push the camera forward on its base while also running the line and working the shutter release with my left hand. In this shot I’ve paused for a moment and you can see my right hand moving back to unhook one of my tank valves from the cave.

The second shot was taken just as the sump starts to open up –  that’s the surface shimmering above me and there’s finally enough room to look up. With sump 1 behind me, the rest of the cave beckons.

About the site

We were back in Elk River streamway this weekend, hoping to survey, tidy up some line and have another look at the end. Elk River currently consists of 6 downstream sumps that we have passed, and a seventh sump that surfaces twice in air bells and continues underwater. It’s over 1.5kms of hard caving to the known end. There are lots of interesting bits – crawling over gravel dragging tanks, sinking in deep mud, squeezing through vertical rift passages and lowering gear through breakdown piles. My favourite bit of the second trip was my push dive at the end into the sixth sump. Unlike the muddy soup I’d been crawling, wading and wriggling through sump 6 was crystal clear (on the way in). Suddenly the hard work was replaced by a dive through a very pretty cave. It definitely made me want to take my camera to the end.

About the trip

This weekend we had a team of four divers with a crew of five support cavers to help us get the gear down the pitch to the water. A few different goals were considered. These included relaying the line in sump 6, surveying sump 6, having another look at the end in sump 7, staging additional tanks in the cave for a later push and of course taking some photos. We eventually decided that fixing the line and survey took precedence. While I was very keen to take the camera I was also pretty happy to put it down after sump 3 and continue through the cave without the extra 7kg fragile load.

About the photos

The cave shots Andreas and I took in the dry sections of Elk last trip came out well and I was happy with them. They were also the result of a dedicated photo trip, and I didn’t want to try and better them while on the run and portering tanks. Instead, I was keen to get underwater photos in the early sumps. This meant being the first diver through before the water turned to brown soup. The sumps are short and very silty, and diving without fins or a weightbelt makes it hard to practise anti-silting techniques. To put it politely, there’s a lot of kicking and thrashing going on to move through the water.

It’s not just the silty floor either, as silt also pours down off the roof when disturbed by bubbles. There’s no way around the fact that within seconds of being underwater you’re going to be the centre of a large silt cloud. The key to photography through clear water is therefore moving fast. For these shots of Sandy coming through the second and third sumps I ducked into the water to the right of the available space, then curved back to look through water than hadn’t yet been swum through. The silt on the left hand side of the picture was created as I came past, and you can see it heading back the slope towards Sandy from my position.

I was glad we had another go with this in the third sump as there really isn’t a lot of time to make adjustments while keeping ahead of the cloud. I rapidly rolled through f-stops with my thumb to compensate for the strobe power being way too low in the top photo. Even though it’s a bit dark I love the textures as Sandy emerges into clear water. In sump 3 there was a bit more space, I had the strobes powered up and I was able to surface on the far side and swim around to get the second shot here. The main difference between these sumps and sump 6 is sump 6 has more room to play with…and it’s another kilometre further in. I’m still tempted.

In the last year I’ve dived in some very special places, including exploration in Queensland’s Camooweal caves, a trip to Weebubbie for ABC’s Catalyst and a return trip just recently, as well as our ongoing project in Elk River cave. There’s also been more than a few trips over to Mount Gambier both to photograph the sinkholes and try out a few different techniques in Tank Cave. And not to forget some lovely local ocean diving and a very relaxing trip to Thailand for Christmas. All of these trips were with a bunch of truly excellent people without whom my underwater photography would not be possible – thank you! Some of the most popular posts of the last year weren’t about my photos at all but the series that showed off my Dad’s historical shots of the Cocklebiddy exploration. This year we also passed the second anniversary of Ag’s death, something that I feel is important to acknowledge and remember.

I’ve been lucky enough to pick up a brilliant new drysuit from the nice folks at Otter, and to have Damo’s support at DKG Drysuits locally for servicing, spares and repairs. This is my third Otter suit and it continues to do an excellent job of keeping me warm and dry. I’ve procured a couple more second hand Inon Z240s for use as off camera strobes in the caves. I also splashed out on a very shiny Canon 100mm f2.8 lens late last year which has been getting a good work out under Melbourne’s piers in preparation for my upcoming 2014 trip on the Arenui through Komodo and Flores. Contact me or Liquid Diving Adventures if you’d like to join me for some truly spectacular tropical ocean diving in August next year.

My photos have been published in a few more places, included the West Australian Sunday Times last week, the current issue of Scuba Diving Magazine, DAN’s Alert Diver and a profile in Women’s Fitness Magazine. I was very happy to place first in the cave diving category of the Oztek photo competition (check out the winning shot here), and recently as a finalist in the ANZANG Nature and Landscape Photographer of the Year competition.

It looks like there’ll be more exciting diving in the next 12 months including continued trips to push the end of Elk River, my Oztek prize trip to the Phillipines with Diversion Dive Travel and a few more cave diving things in the works. If you’re looking for an easy way to keep up with my weekly posts, you can subscribe by email or RSS. For email simply put your email address in the box in the top right margin, and then click the link in the confirmation email that comes through. If you don’t receive a confirmation email, check your spam folder.

Thanks for reading! I look forward to another year of photography, underwater and underground.

About the cave

These two photos were taken in a small sinkhole south of Mt Gambier. I dropped down on a rope from the paddock above, stopping half way down to survey the entrance lake covered in floating bottles and other debris. Directly under the entrance is a huge cone of stuff…a lot of old fencing wire, bottles and tins, 44 gallon drums and other unidentifiables. The water around all of this was crystal clear, so the challenge was working out how to get dive gear on and get in without spiking myself or my drysuit on anything sharp.

About the dive

Having navigated my way off the pile and into the water with dive gear attached we set off around the edge of the cavern zone. It’s only a little sinkhole and once we were under the roof there was a lot more rock and a lot less junk. I find it interesting that all the rubbish in the water is old – times and attitudes have changed. It’s also interesting to see how the things that were thrown away years ago have rusted and decayed.

The site is shallow and wide, with boulders leaning up against the walls to form tunnels in some places. We followed the survey line through several swim throughs, popping out into the main cavern each time.

About the photos

Photographing the various bits of rubbish made this more like a wreck dive than a cave dive. I love the red colours in the rusty metal and how they stand out against the blue water. This sinkhole hasn’t seen much diver traffic so the silt floors are pristine and unmarked. The water tank and the rolls of chicken wire must have rolled down the hill to come to this final resting place where they’ve been rusting away for more than a few years. The rust developing on the sides of the tank adds great texture and I like the way the lines of the cave draw you into the picture.

I made an abortive attempt to get an off camera strobe positioned in the tank without much success. By the time I’d got it halfway right the silt coming off the roof and the rust coming off the tank made great pictures a challenge, and the strobe still wasn’t in the right place. As I reached to rearrange the strobe I could see that getting the ideal position would probably end up with the strobe dropping down through the tank and into a crack in the rock below….it seemed like a good time to exit gracefully and look for the next shot instead.

About the dive

With the back end of the main Weebubbie tunnel down at 40m, and the roof of the railway tunnel around 20m, long dives to the end mean a lot of deco back under the lake. After 90 minutes of photography, swimming and scootering in the depths Stefan and I had 60 minutes to kill up in the shallows. Rather than scissors, paper, rock competitions as the minutes crawled by, we decided it was time for some photographic experimentation.

One of the joys of cave diving is swimming through darkness and watching the walls light up with wandering dive light beams. If you lead the dive, you might see yourself in shadow outline, swimming along the wall of the cave. Light beams pointed at the wall ahead are there for signalling – circles for OK, flashes for problems, and a steady light to know your buddy is right behind you. I feel half blind when I dive in the ocean and have to turn around to check on my buddy. Of course, when you take a camera and light the whole cave with strobes these light and shadow plays are all flattened out in white strobe light in the images. This photo was a way to emphasise the shadows you might see on a cave dive that don’t appear in cave diving photos.

About the photo

The right hand wall of the cave at the deco spot is large, white and flat – perfect for shadow puppets. Getting the set up right took a little bit of fiddling. I initially set up a pair of off camera strobes perched carefully on a rock, and then turned one of them off to turn the double shadow into a single shadow. By angling the strobe to point at 45 degrees up, I could keep the camera at the same depth at the diver and create the shadow up above on the wall. The key here was to get complete separation of the outline of the diver and the outline of their shadow. This meant dropping down to 8m to place the strobe, before returning to 6m for the photography session and continued decompression.

The first shots showed the off camera strobe still bungeed on to Stefan’s sidemounted tank was showing up in the shadow as a strange lump. I moved that, and the next issue was bubbles. They looked fine on the diver, but the shadow bubbles looked a little bit like a smoke eruption out of the shadow diver’s skull. A few shadow bubbles were desirable, but I needed a clear gap between the bubbles and the diver and that required good timing.

With the basics down the next step was refining camera to model to light source to wall distances. By putting the diver closer to the light source, the size of the shadow increased. Get the diver too close to the off camera strobe and the light (and the silt from putting it down on a rock) was in the picture. I moved the off camera strobe further back from the wall to give us more space to play with. Then instead of taking the picture flat on, I moved around to the front to capture the two diver outlines swimming towards the camera. My on camera strobes were turned right down so as not to interfere with the shadow.

Out of the whole photo session at 6m, and hundreds of photos with bubbles in the wrong place and shadows too small, the one up top is my favourite. I like the way the leading shadow catches the eye first, and then you look back to see the diver. Stefan has turned to look at the camera, creating an alien outline in the shadow diver’s face. This is also a technique for beating the curse of the black dive gear. If you can’t persuade your models to buy drysuits in reasonable colours, this is a photo setup that doesn’t require being able to see the details of the diver. And if you are thinking of buying a new suit, red is a lovely colour!

About the cave

By the looks of things, Elk River is going to be taking up a lot of my time this year. Elk (aka the Murrindal Potholes Eastern Master Cave) is the streamway system underlying the Buchan Potholes Reserve. The streamway was first discovered in 2006 by the VCLT and the sump first passed by Jim Arundale, later joined in exploration by Agnes Milowka. This weekend just gone the cave has been extended to nearly 1.7kms with a fantastic dive through sump 7 and beyond by Steve Fordyce to add 115m of line, assisted by Ken Murrey. As the end gets further and further from home, the effort required to put new cave on the map is going to increase exponentially.

About the trip

Four divers traversed Elk this weekend, split into teams of two. While Steve and Ken took “larger” tanks and headed for the end, Andreas and I lumped the camera and a bunch of strobes and dropped our tanks after sump 4. On the initial trip back in January I had left my tanks after sump 3 and taken photos up to sump 4, so I was keen to get the camera into the longer and tricker section of streamway between sumps 4 and 5.

Once we’d ditched our tanks walking, wading and climbing got a lot easier and I was on the lookout for nice photo spots. Dry caving photography is a new hobby for me and I was keen to try out some different lighting. Being able to talk to your model makes a huge difference, but the camera in its housing weighs more than my pair of 3L tanks and holding it straight and level took some effort by the end of the trip.

I wore my older orange Otter drysuit again for the trip, on the basis that we could leave relatively quickly if I put a hole in it. This cave is destroying wetsuits every trip with big gashes in the backs and the knees and yet my drysuit came out mostly unscathed and certainly dry. I wore thin thermals underneath which meant dipping into the water every so often to cool down was very effective. I’ve been lucky and careful with the drysuit three times now – it might be time for a wetsuit trip!

About the photos

A little while back I talked about soft foreground lighting in my underwater shots. I think this becomes doubly important for dry caving where a well lit foreground is likely to be distracting. So the two shots I’ve chosen here both show me trying to be very careful with the on camera lighting, and let the off camera strobes show the cave heading off into the distance. The first image I went for the classic silhouette of Andreas sitting in the water to cool down. You can see the steam coming off him, backlit by the strobe pointing back towards the camera. The second shot here we set the lighting up to light Andreas as well as the cave, and  I used just a touch of on camera light to bring out the decorations above me. I really like the shape of the cave and the sense of distance here – we are about 1km into the system at this stage, with another 700m of known (and being discovered as we took this) cave in front of us.

The photo album from the weekend is now up:

About the site

I’ve been talking a lot about cave diving recently…because that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing. I rectified that this weekend with two lovely dives out in the Bay. The wreck of the Ozone lies very close to shore and half out of the water at Indented Head, on the Bellarine Peninsula. I waded out towards the isolated danger marker and the struts of the wreck sticking up, and I reckon there were only a few times during the “dive” where I wouldn’t have been able to stand up. The hull stretches out flat on the sand and then there’s a few sticky-up bits down one end.

About the dive

After a lovely dive on Lonsdale Wall in the morning, this was a late afternoon dive. I swapped from my wide angle lens to my macro lens intended to try a few different things with the strobes. Being nice and shallow was handy for a clear head and lots of time to play around.

Despite the flat seas being just 50m off the sandy shore made for sandy vis – as you would expect. The larger fish were remarkably nervous. A school of old wives lapped around to see me several times, each time fleeing at the first bubbles. The wreckage is fairly weedy and I meandered my way around and peered into the nooks and crannies looking for critters with limited success. The second shot here shows the little sand-dwelling fish that sit up on their fins and watch you. As the sunlight started to drop off I considered giving up the hunt for anything more than weed to practise on. And then I swam around the back of the boiler to find rows and rows of holes.

About the shot

Each hole in the boiler had its own tiny inhabitant. There were a couple of small fish who backed into the dark and glared at me. There were little red urchins in a lot of them. But the rest had shrimp, one per hole, sitting in the entrances and waving their front legs around. It was a great way to practise macro lighting with the boiler providing a natural snoot and plenty of subjects to choose from.

The shot up top was taken with one strobe only, pulled back and pointed directly at the barrel of my port on the right hand side. I’m close enough to the face of the boiler that the light has hit it and bounced back, giving a more diffuse light on the subject. I prefer this shot to many of the others because I got close enough to fill the frame – this one is uncropped. Getting shrimp in focus can be challenging as they’re too angular capture in a thin plane of focus. After experimenting at f2.8 and failing to get enough light down the hole at f18, this shot worked with just the right depth of field at f9.

About the trip

I’m winding my way down through the Adelaide Hills this morning, after watching the sunrise peek through the clouds. After time spent in the desert the road signs seems like information overload and there’s a lot of people around. We spent the last week at Weebubbie Cave, just over the West Australian border. Weebubbie is beautiful, and not just because you have to appreciate something once you’ve put in so much hard work to get there. Weebubbie has massive tunnels lined with white limestone and full of crystal clear water. From my point of view it was basically a week long photo shoot and I certainly flattened a lot of batteries in the process. Lighting the huge space in an interesting way was challenging, and it took some experimentation to get the shots I’ve posted here.

About the photo technique

When I set off the on camera strobes in smallish tunnels there’s a bit of leeway in which way the off camera sensors are pointing. Once the tunnel gets beyond a certain point of size or the walls get dark enough, the light stops bouncing back. This means the on camera light needs to hit the off camera sensors dead on and the distances at which the triggers will work is reduced.

Last trip in Weebubbie I had a number of frustrating experiences where the composition I wanted meant I was too far away from my model to trigger the off camera strobes. Over the last few months I’ve followed up on various technological solutions, including trying to find triggers that work on a different part of the EM spectrum with better penetration through the water. It seems that there’s not much that’s going to get through the water distance required fast enough for the camera shutter and therefore light-based triggers may be the best solution.

So if the triggers weren’t going to work, I considered putting down additional strobes on the cave floor between myself and my model. The chain strobing effect would put out extra light but also seriously slow down the dive. Another difficulty is that the floor in Weebubbie is covered in incredibly fine white silt. Each strobe placed down was going to create a milky cloud in the water, mid-photo – not ideal.

In the end, the solution that produced the photos above was an old-fashioned one. Instead of trying to trigger off camera light with on camera strobes, this technique relies on human co-ordination and timing. I moved the camera into B for “bulb” mode, turned off one strobe and pointed the other one back behind me. When Stefan saw the backward pointing strobe go off as I opened the shutter, he would manually trigger the off camera strobes, and I would take my finger off the shutter. With shutter speeds around one second all of our dive lights had to be off. I took a very dim LED backup torch and hung it down out of my drysuit pocket, which gave just enough ambient light so we didn’t swim into the walls. It was too small to show up in the photo, and also not enough to really help with framing shots of my invisible model in an inky black cave.

Taking photos in bulb mode like this created both more freedom and more restrictions. I could be as far away from the subject as I wanted, but it was very hard to compose the shots accurately. I had only a minimal idea of where my buddy was in relation to my lens, and that could change by the time he flashed the strobes. No way to time photos to catch bubbles here. Removing the foreground lighting also changes the way the foreground rocks are shaped from the camera’s POV, and that took some trial and error to improve on.

About the dive

We had three different sessions in the water trying this technique, with a photo review and improvement discussion each night. In the end, the most important predictor for success was getting everyone in the right place and all communications completed before turning off the lights. Once my eyes adjusted to the tiny amount of available light and with lots of water to swim around in, I really loved taking these shots. Floating in space, disconnected from everything, feeling the cave more than seeing it…all great fun. I hope you like the results.