Shooting in Hell

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Jad Davenport

"Flash floods, assassin bugs, poisonous gasses," Bruce Hagan, head of Global Medical Rescue Services and an expert on wilderness survival, ticked off the hazards of caving as he downed another rum-and-Coke. It was just past the witching hour and we were elbow-to-elbow at the open-air bar in Ian Anderson's Caves Branch Jungle Lodge, a rustic retreat deep in the misty hills of western Belize. "And, of course, there's the rabid bats, lung diseases, and venomous snakes."

Hagan, a bear of a guy with a handlebar mustache and tattooed biceps, had come to this New Jersey-sized nation wedged between Mexico and Guatemala, not for Belize's most famous natural attraction -- the cerulean lagoons and rainbow-colored corals of its own Great Barrier Reef -- but for the country's lesser known underworld. Caves.

The mountains of Belize are honeycombed with thousands of caves, a photographer's dreamland of polished stalactites and subterranean rivers. But they're also the stuff of nightmares. To the ancient Maya, caves were portals to the spirit world of demons and gods, Xibalba, "the place of fear." And after hearing Hagan's grocery list of caving perils, it was easy to understand why.

I nodded at the bartender for another Cuba Libre and thought about the perils I was about to face. I'd come to photograph Xibalba. For most of my career I called myself a "natural-light" photographer, a professional way of saying, "strobe photography befuddles me." How on earth, I wondered, as a midnight moon rose above the jungle pressing in on the lodge, was I going to photograph a pitch-black hell?

JUNGLE EXTREMES

"You don't find an exposure," National Geographic legend Bill Allard once corrected me when I admitted my trouble with fill-flash photography. "You build one. You create it like a chef."

Allard's recipe for fill-flash? He starts by metering off "found light" -- ambient sources, like the sun or a neon sign. "Underexpose the entire scene by a stop or two, and crank your strobe low, sometimes as low as it will go. Then mix the ingredients." By building on light sources, you can eke out color and sharpen edges. This is especially important in high-contrast scenes where digital cameras notoriously clip the shadows and highlights.

That was the situation I found while hiking to the caves. I wanted some shots of Glen and Brian -- two friends I'd conned into joining me as photo assistants and reluctant models -- here in the jungle.

Hundreds of feet above our heads, the dense canopy of ceiba trees and strangler figs blocked out 98 percent of the blazing midday sun, casting us in green shade. The 2 percent of solar power piercing the screen glowed like flames on the shiny leaves. When I exposed for skin tones, the highlights blew out. When I exposed for the sunspots, Brian and Glen became a pair of faceless Grim Reapers. It was a "lightmare."

The solution? I popped an SB-800 Speedlight on my Nikon D200, cocked it up at a 45-degree angle, extended the bounce card, and began stirring Allard's recipe.

To keep the jungle a cool, forest green, I flipped my white balance to Sunny. To add a kiss of sunshine to the skin tones, I taped an amber filter on the strobe. In the end, I'd concocted a recipe that balanced the contrasting light and illuminated the emerald jungle.

LIGHTING IN 3-D

On-camera fill-flash, however, wouldn't get me much further than the mouth of a cave. And when Abel, our guide, disappeared into a gap no bigger than my shoulders beneath a mossy boulder, I left the one-dimensional world of ambient light behind.

The most surreal -- and claustrophobic -- aspect of caving is the sensation of moving through a medium, not over one, as on a forest trail. A few shots of Brian slithering into the tunnel proved that a single on-camera strobe wouldn't capture the three-dimensional experience. I needed more tools.

The first tool was my sync cord. By getting the strobe away from the lens, I was able to create some depth with angled shadows on Brian. Then Glen placed a second SB-800 strobe on a mini tripod behind a rock to illuminate the stone walls from a different angle. The two strobes together carved out contours.

In a minivan-sized chamber, we'd made a photo studio. And it only took an hour. An hour of Brian frozen on his elbows and knees on sharp stones. An hour of Glen tucked into a ball behind me, repeatedly dialing the strobe power up and down as I shook my head, "Too hot, drop it back to a quarter power."

Absorbed in the moment, I stared at one of the strobes to adjust the diffuser and my world suddenly exploded.

"Sorry," Brian's disembodied voice came through the white blankness. As pinpricks of light sparked in my brain, I heard snickering. Time to move on.

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