15.04.11
Robbie Shone: Creative lighting underground
Caving is an increasingly popular pursuit and many of the world’s most remote networks are now accessible to all. So we caught up with professional photographer Robbie Shone to find out how he shoots underground. By Jimmy Edmonds.
It is not every day a photographer can say they’ve been where no one has gone before. The rise of technology has meant man can explore further to record what he sees, yet professional photographer Robbie Shone continues to chart a world that has never seen the light of day.
Robbie is a cave photographer and over the past 10 years he has travelled to some of the world’s most remote regions to spend weeks underground exploring and capturing vast networks of chambers, tunnels, lakes and rivers. He was part of the teams that photographed, for the first time, all of the locations featured on these pages. He has travelled to China and Borneo on photographic expeditions and can be away for four weeks or two months twice a year, depending on the project. The most remote place he has visited is Papua New Guinea with a National Geographic team in 2006. The longest time he has spent underground is 13 days while in Vietnam.
“You quickly get used to it. The most unusual feeling is when you come back out. There are no trees or vegetation underground and the smell is very different. A lot of these caves are found in jungles so even as you are getting to the entrance you can already smell the foliage. You can feel the warmth of the climate. The biggest thing to hit you is the smell, but then after an hour of walking through the jungle it’s like you never left it.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking light might be the thing he misses most, but Robbie has become proficient at illuminating even the largest spaces underground using a combination of artificial sources, from old-fashioned flashbulbs to modern LED head torches.
“If I’m after a really big image of a large passage I’ll use the flashbulbs favoured by press photographers, which are full of magnesium wire. These are one-use-only bulbs, but they emit so much light that electric strobes and flashguns can’t touch them in terms of output. In smaller cave passages I’ll use smaller strobes and flashguns. I’ll even use the head torches we wear because they’re so good these days.”
Robbie studied fine art/photography at Sheffield University. He also went there to rock climb, but a friend introduced him to caving and he was hooked. He found it more exciting because of the potential to go to unexplored places.
The nature of his course let him combine his two passions and specialise in cave photography as part of his degree. He was still using a darkroom and would not get into digital until a couple of years after he graduated. He started to develop his technique inthe Peak Cavern network of caves near the Derbyshire village of Castleton in the Peak District.
Today he can judge a shot by eye, but it wasn’t until he started playing around with light by moving flashguns closer to walls that he realised he could enhance the texture and shapes of his new environment with side lighting. He found he could reveal the shadows of every undulation this way, where as onboard camera flash often flattened the rock formations. Now he uses a combination of infrared slave flash units that he triggers with a transmitter attached to his camera. Every flash unit he uses is remotely detonated.
“The key to success is knowing what not to light up; when you see black spaces in a cave, the imagination runs wild.” For example, while exploring on the island of Borneo in a cave called Hurricane Hole, Robbie found the entrance to be tight to get into, an unusual case with the caves in the region. It was a tight crawl for the first 100-150m. To light his shot Robbie used a couple of flashguns set behind the lead members of the team. Because they were in quite a confined space, only that area was lit. Robbie stood in a large chamber looking across into the narrow space and loved the large unlit black areas outside the crawl. He used these to his creative advantage.
“I’m always looking to capture something different. I’ve seen so many photographs taken underground by good amateur photographers, but everyone seems to be taking the same images, shots that are handheld and shoulder height, so I’m trying to create something that’s not been seen before. At one point I got into looking down big shafts from the top trying to get a sense of the scale, a sense of vertigo. Most people take a photograph looking up from the floor where it’s easy to set up a tripod.”
Robbie rarely uses a tripod when he’s using infrared slave units. He can wire everything to 1/60th of a second and so doesn't need one, but if he’s shooting down a big shaft he’ll fix a tripod to the wall so the camera can stick out at a right angle to the floor.
“I use a turnbuckle for this, which can be found in most mechanics’ yards. This is attached to the centre arm of the tripod. You then spread the three legs out against the wall so one end of the turnbuckle is connected to the central arm and the other end is connected to a hook on the wall. As you turn the turnbuckle the two threaded ends draw together andas long as the legs are fitted rigidly they will hold the tripod in place.”
One of his biggest concerns when underground is keeping his equipment clean and in working order. He uses Peli waterproof cases to transport his gear. As soon as he opens the case there’s a bar towel which he uses to clean his hands thoroughly before taking out kit.
“I try to keep kit to a minimum – one or two bags, but if we’re photographing really large chambers we’ll need a lot of flashbulbs that might not weigh much, but do take up space and can easily fill a rucksack on the way in. But on the way out they can be smashed up and carried out that way.”
He takes with him a couple of Canon EOS 5D MkII bodies, but his workhorse lens is an L series 16-35mm f/2.8. When it comes to charging up gear there are a couple of options, depending on the location; they might have a generator or have to rely on solar panels. On a four-week expedition Robbie and his team will spend three weeks exploring the caves. They can often find up to 15 miles of caves that no one has everseen before. During this time Robbie is working out what he’d like to photograph and how. Then in the fourth week, he’ll shoot the locations he scouted previously. Every shot is set up.
Not many people photograph caves at a high level. It is a challenge to photograph a cave as opposed to a typical landscape, which simply requires a foreground, middle ground and background. Cave photography takes in anywhere between eight and 10 different flash sources, which Robbie has to position all over the space, depending on where he thinks the light will fall correctly. Before digital he didn’t know if he had the image or not and would take 500 frames to be on the safe side. When establishing his shots Robbie likes to pick an interesting foreground with a person in it to give a sense of scale and then he’ll look to light the background subtly, again with someone there for scale. This is good practice in cave photography because it reveals the sheer size of some of these underground networks.
The shot, middle right, was taken in a cave in South Wales called Dan-yr-Ogof. It is a showcave you can pay to visit, although the section seen here is not open to the public. It is a classic phreatic passage, which means that when it was being formed it was full of water under pressure. The water erodes the walls at the same rate all the way around, to give the passage its distinctive circular shape.
“If you are shooting in a small space you are limited, but you can get more in with a wide lens and closer if you need to. As long as there’s something interesting for the eye to latch on to and draw the viewer into the space, I’m happy. The usual rules apply. I want the viewer to smile because they’ve seen a good photograph. We’re thinking of going to Borneo in January where the largest chamber underground can be found. It’s huge and I’d like to photograph that. The last time an image was made there was in 1984, so it needs a new take on it.”
Robbie doesn’t play a leading role in organising trips, but he always knows the people he’s going with and can trust them. A couple of recent expeditions have had a research slant. His girlfriend, who works out the age of caves, has joined the trips. Robbie photographs her as she records sediment samples from the walls. The teams also survey the caves they enter so they can create maps. They’ll use a compass, a clinometer – which measures the inclination of the gradient as you go up or down – and a laser tape measure for working out distance. All of this data is recorded in stages throughout the exploration and the readings are then entered into special cave mapping software that gives an accurate picture of where they’ve been.
Yet despite all of this preparation and care, cave exploration can be risky. It is easy to wander around not really aware that if you break a bone you have to get yourself out again, which could mean going up and down climbs, swimming across lakes and squeezing through small places with the injury. In the tropics there are additional factors to contend with, such as snakes, scorpions and spiders. “I know people in their sixties who are still caving at a high level, but I also know people in their forties who have had to retire because of bad backs and knees.
It’s all about how you treat your body in the caves. I’ve had a few near-misses but I’ve never thought ‘I’m never doing this again.’ In 2003 I was in a cave in Borneo in a climb that was 10m high, I was quite tired with all my camera gear on my back and at about 8m I grabbed on to a hold I thought was solid rock, but it gave way and I fell on to a flat boulder surrounded by a forest of spires. I couldn’t believe my luck. If I had fallen a metre either side I would have impaled myself on one of these razor-sharp spikes. I was a bit bruised and shaken up, but the only thing I broke was a UV filter on my lens.”
Living underground for extended periods requires a unique approach. The image, top left on page 40, was shot in Crete as a part of a student-led expedition and shows how teams collect water for drinking and cooking.
It rarely rains on the Greek island, so the only way to collect water is to suspend a sheet from the ceiling of the cave to catch all the small drops that fall from it. A big puddle develops which can be siphoned into plastic bottles and carried. This method allowed the team to fill 30 two to three-litre bottles in a day. The water comes from snow that has fallen in the winter. As the temperature rises through the spring and summer this water melts and falls through into the cave. Shaded areas containing snow plugs can be found on the surface even in the middle of summer. These will slowly melt and the water finds its way through the small fissures of the limestone that makes up the mountains.
Dinner for the expedition teams usually consists of dried soup, with a main course of pasta and tins of flavoured tuna. Dessert will be chocolate, washed down with lots of cups of tea, coffee or hot chocolate. During the day sustenance is drawn from chocolate, peanuts, raisins and long-life cheese on crackers.
Having explored and photographed many cave systems around the world over the past 10 years, Robbie hopes he will one day be asked to shoot for National Geographic. He was on the team for the 2006 trip to Papua New Guinea for his knowledge and experience. The magazine sponsored the expedition, but sent out its own photographer. Robbie is hoping soon to become part of a truly unique trip.
“I would like to go to Patagonia or Peru, where the scenery is as dramatic as the caves. There are many unexplored areas in Peru because the caves are at 4,000m above sea level so you have to climb a mountain before going underground.”
Robbie recommends that anyone wanting to become a cave photographer who is not already a caver should first become comfortable exploring underground. Learning basic climbing skills is also useful. Robbie is an IRATA (Industrial Rope Access Trade Association) qualified, level three supervisor. This organisation is the world’s leading authority on industrial rope access, which means he can work up high on buildings and bridges when he’s not underground. He suggests registering with a local caving club and going out with members who can show you around. Once you’ve experienced caving you’ll realise the set-up you’ll need to light your shots. Then you can go down for yourself and shoot.
Landscape photographers are always looking to make original images, searching out new places and techniques that will enable them to reveal the world as they see it. Cave photography is no different. All the elements are there; it just requires a little more patience and a lot more light, but with the resources available today it is accessible to anyone with drive and passion. These images are a testament to Robbie Shone’s imagination and experience as both an explorer and a photographer, and I can only hope that one day soon he is given his shot by the explorers’ magazine he loves. Who knows what he’ll find in the shadows on the way down.
Whats in your kit bag?
- Two Canon EOS 5D MkIIs
- Lexar CF cards
- Canon 16-35mm f/2.8
- Canon 24-70mm f/2.8
- Canon 15mm fisheye
- Gitzo Basalt tripod with MagicBall ballhead
- Canon Speedlites
- Vivitar 283 flashguns
- Scurion K head torch
- Sylvania 5B flashbulb
- Wotan M3B flashbulb
- Philips PF 60E, PF 100 flashbulbs
- MacBook Pro
ONLINE RESOURCES
Try Caving www.trycaving.co.uk
British CAVE Research Association http://bcra.org.uk
Biography:
Adventure and travel photographer Robbie Shone has photographed some of the world’s most spectacular caves. He has worked with National Geographic magazine and the BBC and has refined skills by working in hostile environments and difficult conditions.
www.shonephotography.com
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