I’ve spent 15 years shooting underground exploration, the “Earth from Below.” What is hard for people to understand about the pictures is that the caves are completely dark. There is no light at all inside them. So everything that you see in my pictures has to be lit.
In the years I’ve been pursuing this sort of exploration, my lighting technique has gotten pretty refined. It can be summed up as “less is more.” These two different views of Myo falls are good examples of why I think that way.
The room that contains the falls is enormous and remote. Conventional strobes would not begin to light the room and studio lights that MIGHT be powerful enough are far to heavy and cumbersome to use underground (not to mention the problems of high voltage and water). What I use for lighting big underground spaces is old technology.
In the 1930s and 40s pictures were lit by flashbulbs- think Weegee-. These wonders look like a regular household bulb but contain a magnesium filament that burns only once but produces a huge amount of light. They also have the added advantage of a “slow peak.” The filament takes a long time to burn (1/5 second) so moving water blurs.
In the upper picture David “Moose” Nixon is lit with an electronic strobe in a softbox and the background is lit with a flashbulb. The bulb has to be synched with a special slave and held by an assistant hanging on rope next to the waterfall.
The bottom picture shows another view of Myo falls from across the lake. My assistant Robbie Shone and I are perched on a rock 1/2 out of the water and we can’t even see the falls through all the swirling mist. The camera opens, the bulbs fire... When I first saw the picture come up on the Canon 5d’s screen I thought “wow, that is so cool but no one will ever believe it is underground.”
