Hola

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks, and in that time I’ve done some awesome diving, and this weekend I’ve been going through and editing and sorting my shots, as I’ve got another trip soon and must get this done prior to prepping for the next Red Sea Relaxed in less than a week.

Quick Turnaround

So kit has simply been removed from Dive bag chucked in the wash and dried ready to pack on Thursday night. And as the washing machine spins into a final frenzy, I’m getting my first look at my Cenotes pictures from the Yucatan jungle, half a world and a few time zones away.

Cave In

I am looking at my pictures of The Pit our last Cenote, where we did our final two dives of our Mexican photo adventure. Our trip followed the format of the trip from two years previous, we had nearly a week at Isla de Mujeres diving with statues and whalesharks honing our skills, and the second week was at the Catalonia Royal Tulum making daily excursions to visit Cenotes, big freshwater filled caverns, rendering the Yucatan peninsula a swiss cheese like geology which has become a mecca for divers, keen to experience something new. They are also pretty spectacular to look at with crystal clear waters pierced by sunbeams from above the jungle floor. So as a group of underwater photographers we were keen to get some great shots.

Fit for The Pit

I will be posting a guest trip report soon from both locations, and also some technique posts I have planned, both from the shooting and editing perspective, but right now i’d like to share a few of my pictures from The Pit, and also a cautionary tale about why you shouldn’t really dive with a cold, even though the pay off was worth it!!!

The Location

Our fantastic dive guide Tavo (short for Gustavo) an experienced cavern and cave guide had come good with all his recommendations from the previous couple of days, and understands the needs of photographers, and as on my previous trip to Mexico and using ProDive where he works, he had offered dive sites that were not necessarily convenient to him, but would give us the sun position to highlight and illuminate caverns at the times of day we would be visiting.

This time for our final dives he was very keen to show us The Pit, I had suggested Angelita which he had endorsed, but reckoned we would find The Pit even more productive.

I had based my decision on a number of shots from Angelita i’d seen showing its eerie sulphur cloud pierced by dead trees, which is an in vogue shot at the moment.

He said that we had a similar cloud at The Pit, but that overall we would find the Pit more productive from top to bottom. He’s come good on every one of his recommendations, so I decided to go with it.

Cold Comfort

I had been feeling sorry for myself nursing a cold from the previous few days, but had just dosed myself up with decongestants and paracetamol, and lots of water, and made slow easy descents, to be kind to my ears. Yes I know you shouldn’t ever dive with a cold, but I wasn’t going to miss out on some awesome cavern dives.

My cold had developed into a tickly cough, fairly minor but annoying, and didn’t give me any pause for thought as Tavo briefed us for our last dive.
The Pit isn’t like a lot of the previous cavern dives we had done where we had gone from chamber to chamber, via lined tunnels, nothing too challenging or extreme and all of our party had all become accustomed to the darkness punctuated by wondrous veils of light beams.

A weighty issue

He’d advised us to add a couple of pounds of lead to our belts, as we would be encountering a Halocline, a layer of thick disorientating heavy salty water, that would make us more buoyant. As I had been diving all week in the Cenotes with no lead at all this was no major hardship.
As we made our descent, into what can only be described as one of the most otherworldly dive experiences I have encountered, all was well.
The Pit is a huge aircraft hanger sized vertical cavern, going down to over 30m where the sulphur layer is, with dead vegetation and trees sticking eerily out of the gloomy layer.
I reached the Halocline with no issues at all, and gave a big breath out to descend through the salty strata, unfortunately this started a cough which got out of hand, and I quickly started to feel disorientated, as a case of mild vertigo was triggered.
This in normal conditions isn’t very nice, but when in a cave underground, without the regular frame of references, really threw me.

I’m a very experienced diver with many thousands of dives under my belt, however this was something new, and I realised that I had to get things, and my breathing, under control before things took a turn for the worse.

Tavo could see something was amiss, and realising that I was a bit discombobulated gently guided me to the cavern wall where I could steady myself, and concentrate on breathing slowly and steadily until I felt better.

Nice and slowly does it..

A few slow breaths later and I was back to feeling better, and orientated with my environment, but this was definitely a lesson learnt, and proof that every days a school day, even if todays lesson plan had been on a steep learning curve, and a note to self to not put myself under pressure to dive if I’m not feeling well, regardless of the self imposed pressure to do so.
Once sorted I enjoyed the dive and really got a lot out of the dive photographically, but resolved to do the next dive at a max depth of 15m, and not push myself into over breathing which I’m sure had brought on the coughing fit, and dizzy do.

Epic Scale

To be honest the scale of the place in my opinion was best captured at the 15m mark enabling the photographer to use some foreground stalagtites to enhance the scale of the amazing environment we were in.  Which was where all these shots in the blog have been captured from.

Photographically speaking you need to be brave, and be prepared to use slower shutter speeds than you may be comfortable with, along with higher ISO’s
A lot of photographers are reluctant to raise their ISO’s worried about excessive noise, and I’ve done a blog post a couple of years back after my last visit here, and to see it please go here so I’m not going to go into too much detail now.

Exposing on the right side of things

This time though I decided to experiment with picking the slowest shutter speed I thought I could hand hold (1/15 sec) and an aperture not completely wide open to keep edge sharpness at the optimum, and I didn’t stray too high with the ISO’s mostly keeping in the range of 400 to 1600, this meant that a lot of the files were very dark in camera, this is called exposing to the right (eTTR) the idea being that you then process the files and boost exposure in software, in theory this should reduce the noise overhead, by not artificially increasing noise in camera. To be honest I’ve had mixed results and it needs further experimentation to get the best from it, but if circumstances are favourable it appears to work quite well.
You will have to get used to having an almost black screen when you try and review your shots on the back of the camera,and this has the side effect of making your post processing workflow really slow, until you’ve boosted exposure of all the shots in Lightroom or Photoshop as you can’t see what you’ve got until you do this.
It’s a lot like push processing film, which is a technique I used to use years ago to shoot in low light with film.
You will get grain but it shouldn’t be too bad, and I have a camera with a quite small sensor a Micro 4/3 so if you have a camera with a bigger sensor you should get technically better results with less noise and grain from this technique.

Flash Harry

As a postscript don’t forget to also take some shots using your strobes, the roofs and sides of these caves are beautiful examples of geology in action, so occasionally turn your camera inwards and make a record of your more immediate surroundings, the guides are also very well used to being photographed and very willing to model for your camera. You just need to direct them to where you want them, and they won’t flap around like newbies either such is their mastery of buoyancy!!

I just hope I’ve captured the scale and magnificence of the place and done it justice.
Another blog soon, with a strongly Mexican flavour.

If you’d like to see what I’ve written about the techniques of shooting in low light environments then please check out an earlier blog post with a slide show of the earlier Cenotes trip then please check this post out here.

And please check out my future trips page here.

Duxy