Caving photographer Sam Davis shines a light on his underground camera passion

My talk is called ‘Illuminating the Underworld’ and it will be about cave photography – taking photos underground in natural passageways and also in mines or anywhere there’s no light and where some unusual access equipment is required to get there. 

I’ve always been a big traveller, ever since I went on holidays with my parents – expeditions to caves in Spain and Slovenia and places like that. 

I grew up in the Yorkshire Dales and was surrounded by caves, so they were a big part of my life. When I graduated from university, I went backpacking around the world and that’s when my photography started getting better.

I was caving less back then but gradually picked it up again over the past few years, and have taken my acquired photography skills underground – starting to experiment and see what I could produce.

Absolutely – a photographer called Jerry Wooldridge, who was a family friend. He passed away last year and was a pioneer in the underground photography world. 

A couple of years ago he was kind enough to spend about two and a half hours on the phone with me, discussing cave photography techniques and the challenges that he used to face with film, things such as batteries and getting equipment underground.

He was definitely one of my biggest inspirations. In 2018, we had the Thailand cave rescue, which produced several films and TV series. 

Seeing what was done with the underground cinematography has been really inspiring, too. I think the Thailand cave rescue has inspired a new generation of cavers.

The main thing is getting your gear into the cave and making choices about what you’re going to take and what you’re going to leave behind. 

Is your gear portable enough, is it delicate? Is it weather-sealed or is it drop-proof? There are lots of different factors to consider, most related to the cameras themselves. 

The other challenges are how you are going to protect your equipment while you’re getting it to the area where you want to take photographs. 

Are you just going to put it in a camera bag, a dry bag – which is what I do – or are you going to lock it in a hard case? They weigh a lot more, so you’ve got a choice to make there as well. 

So it’s a big trade-off between size and weight and also just how robust the gear is. And then, at the other end of the scale, are you compromising on the image quality by making choices based on the toughness of a camera?

A lot of it is setting out my objectives before I go down into the cave. For a planned photo trip, I will take my OM System OM-5, an M.Zuiko Digital ED 8mm F1.8 Fisheye Pro lens and an M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-45mm F4 Pro lens. 

I’d also take a macro lens if we’re looking at photographing little details in the cave, but generally speaking, I just take my 8mm and 12-45mm lenses. 

If we’re going to be doing any storytelling about people within the cave, and taking any portraits of them, then I might consider something like the M.Zuiko Digital 45mm F1.8, which is a really small Olympus lens. 

Lighting-wise, there are choices to make. Are we going to use continuous lighting, as in the LED torches that are useful for exploring the caves, or are we going to take a camera flash setup with us? 

They’re probably about the same weight, but there are pros and cons to each system, which is something I’m going to go through in my talk. It’s all about bringing light where there is no light and using those lights quite fastidiously.

I’ll be suggesting how to get into caving because I was almost born into it and in that sense was lucky. But for people who live in cities and towns, who don’t have access to caves – or think they don’t – there are lots of caving clubs around and my advice would be to join one. In my talk, I’ll explain how to go about doing that. 

Then, I’ll move on to photography, the equipment and all the considerations I mentioned earlier – image quality versus the toughness of the gear and the choices you have to make – and finally, I’ll share the typical setups I use and the technical side of the different lighting configurations.