ericbennett

"Tragado"

You are looking at a narrow sea cave going out into the ocean, maybe wide enough for two people to squeeze through, that goes on for maybe 100 meters or so. I u...
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You are looking at a narrow sea cave going out into the ocean, maybe wide enough for two people to squeeze through, that goes on for maybe 100 meters or so. I usually don't write much about my images because I like them to tell the story on their own, but this one was an image that made me use pretty much everything I know, so it might be interesting for some people to just hear about how it was shot. The water would come rushing in and the tide and rocks would move my tripod around and try to suck it out into the ocean. I had to hold it down with both hands while I shot my exposures in order for it to stay as still as possible. There was tons of moisture inside the cave and I had to clean my lens before every exposure I would take in order to remove the fog. The caves were very, very dark which made the dynamic range almost impossible to manage, but out of maybe 30 shots or so I was able to get a somewhat clean exposure of the cave walls at 15" f-8 ISO1600 with my hand blocking the light, then I worked at getting some shorter exposures of the tide which I had to take and combine several since you could see my shadow in the water, so I moved around in different places as I took each shot and then blended out my shadow in PS. Ambient light was coming in from both the entrance and the exit of the cave since it was so dark inside. It was very strange light to deal with since I was looking at the light coming in, but my shadow was in front of me.... mind trip.
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