The further you head into Clearwater Cave, the dimmer the light becomes until you reach a point where daylight ceases to penetrate the darkness.
In the photo below we'd progressed further into the cave and were about to lose sight of the mighty entrance we'd passed through. You can see a set of wooden stairs to the right of the frame. The movement of the torch held by the man behind the railing hints at the exposure length. Since I didn't have a tripod I must have braced my camera against a rock formation or another railing.
At the time I had two Canon T90 SLR film cameras and one Canon 300TL Speedlite for the T90. The 300TL is barely lighting up the far wall but the exposure meter was probably being fooled by exposure of the foreground and the bright spot at the entrance. hdr was not an option back then and with slide film what you exposed was what you got. Prints could be dodged and burned in the printing process to extend the range in the print, but slides couldn't. I have earlier posted some HDR from different slide exposures where I retained a bracket of three different exposures on three different slides but I didn't do that here.
I still have one of the T90's with a few lenses and the 300TL Speedlite in a box in my closet. I used to trade my cameras in when upgrading but since the T90 was the last of the Canon manual focus cameras and since it introduced the curved body shape all DSLRs have today, I decided to retain one.
Get a 15% discount on your purchase of or upgrade to onOne Perfect Photo Suite 7 when you enter discount code rdavisphoto at checkout. Click on the image below for this offer.
