CAMPS GULF PHOTOGRAPHY TRIP
By Bill Walker

A few weeks ago Sean and Becky Roberts started planning a trip to TAG. The Roberts had never been past the entrance trunk in Camps Gulf, so we decided on a trip there and to several other caves in the area. We've been doing a lot of Quicktime 360s lately (see Bat Cave Cleanup) and Sean has really honed his cave photography skills (see Sean's Tumbling Rock photos.)

I don't know if it was Sean or I, but someone said, "Camps Gulf 360!" We both looked at each other and laughed our butts off. That statement just sounded so ridiculous. Camps Gulf - the rooms are just incredibly huge, many hundreds of feet across. Only a few people have attempted to light them up, and we wanted to shoot a 360? Ridiculous.

Also, everyone says that you can't take pictures in Camps Gulf with electronic strobes. The only photos of the cave were taken with huge magnesium flash bulbs used in WW2 for nighttime aerial photography.

But the more we thought about it, the less ridiculous it sounded. Sean said, "You know, when we were in Tumbling Rock, I lit up the Hall of the Gods with just my Nikon flash. That's a couple hundred feet across. It might not be impossible to light up Camps Gulf with electronic strobes." Sean has a super sensitive digital camera that just sucks in the light. It was on!

Sean planned for a couple of weeks, and a we started building equipment on Friday morning. He built a couple of sticks to hold the multiple flashes we would need to light the cave up. Sean had 5 Quantaray strobes, a Vivitar, and a big Nikon. The flashes could be positioned in almost any direction, but the slave units only have about 10-20 feet of practical use. We needed a way to set them off from hundreds of feet away, so Sean built a super sensitive slave to hook up to his bad boy Nikon flash. This slave was so sensitive that an LED light would trigger it. (We did an experiment in Sean's bathroom to test the sensitivity of the slave unit. He set a flash off in his hand, totally covering it with his palm. The red light that came out of the back of his hand triggered the slave!)

At this point, we still didn't have any idea if we could pull this off or not. We just hoped for the best.

So, we packed up that Friday afternoon and started the usual all night brutal drive to TAG. We arrived at Camps Gulf about 3am Saturday and decided to sleep until morning.

After our breakfast of turkey sandwiches, we started taking pictures in the alternate entrance. Easy stuff; we wanted to warm up with something we knew we could shoot. We next moved to the main entrance, took a few stills, and decided to shoot a Quicktime 360. The entrance trunk is big, but we had no problems lighting it up. We used one flash for most of the panorama, and used a second for the long shot down the trunk passage. We were feeling confident now.

We started climbing up the breakdown pile to get to the first room. (Now remember that Sean had never been to any of the big rooms before) We climbed to the top, Sean walked around the big piece of breakdown and got his first view of the room. "Oh, no. What have I got myself into! We can't light this. This room is obscene."

We started taking pictures and playing around. The equipment worked great. The supersensitive slave worked from several hundred feet away. The Nikon set off the other flash arrays. One problem, though - the mist and dust in the room was incredible which caused tons of back-scatter.

Sean was a little disappointed and we moved to the Rotunda room. We set up on the breakdown pile and started taking pictures. We played around with different shots. We even shot an 8 second exposure with just my carbide light. I shook up the generator for 8 seconds - and it worked! It lit the room up, not bright of course, but you could clearly see all the walls. The only problem was that there was a huge ball of light where I was standing. (A few days later when we looked at the pictures, I said, "you know if I had been behind a rock, that shot probably would have worked.)

We were lighting up the room with his flashes, but having major problems with back-scatter. We moved back down into the trunk passage and noticed that the mist was gone, so we set up for the Quicktime 360.

Three and a half hours later we were done. The large areas of the 360 were easy to shoot - you just blast as much light as you can into the void. The close areas are actually the hardest to shoot because the flash must stay in the same position or the shadows will change. When shooting a panorama, everything must stay consistent. We've developed a lot of little tricks to shoot these 360's, and we developed a few more that day.

Sean also figured out how to deal with the back-scatter problem. We know that we can light up the rooms now (without the back-scatter), so we will be back soon to shoot a few more 360's.

I won't delve into the panorama production - I don't have the time to write a manual. Basically, you take a bunch of overlapping pictures and stitch them together. If you would like to learn more about the technology, start at Apple's site.

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