Pant Mawr Photography Trip - 25 Mar 2006

Saturday March 25th 2006

Members present: Adrian Turner,  Gary Douthwaite,  John Singleton,  Matt Ewles

A rather rainy day!!! We parked as for Little Neath, and the streamway was already gushing. It took around an hour to walk to Pant Mawr, along the pathway as far as the concrete bridge over the stream, and then bearing left along the line of trees. Garys GPS then took us the remaining 0.5km or so to the pothole, which is surrounded by a fence.

I rigged the entrance which has a fun large Y-hang, and we descended. The streamway was shallow and fairly quiet, ankle deep for most. We made quick progress to a chamber with lots of pretties, including straws and stalagtites, in particular, one very promenant one which we called 'the carrot' (see photos).

We spend nearly 45 minutes in this chamber optimising photographs. We experimented with flash, headlights and exposure and found the best pictures with a digital camera were achieved with the camera on automatic exposure both with and without its own flash, and by manually activating the remote flashes as soon as the camera had started to expose. Some good closer-up photos were also achieved with LED headlights as the main illumination, as these give a good all-round glow rather than a concentrated beam.

Ade also had his SLR which we experimented with on various exposure times... we currently await to see if we got any of these right.

Further downstream we got some lovely photos of the main curtain formation and surrounding straw bundles, which we illuminated from behind with Johns LED headlight to get the shadows pointing towards the camera, which looks really nice.

Finally we got some photos of the mains streamway chamber, just by the large curtain formation. This involved two remote flashes being pointed along the length of the chamber, one approx 5m from the camera and one about 10m, with John and I who were holding them stooping behind rocks to stay out of the picture. The photos seem good, though some more illumination of certain parts would have been nice.

On the way out we got a little lost... It had been raining VERY heavily while we had been underground, and the streamway way deep and very strong and we didn't recognise it as the bit we had walked down!!! Wet feet all round! The water was cascading down the entrace pitch. On the walk back, we got VERY wet indeed. The stream had rised at least 1.5m and was gushing down the valley, and the concrete bridge, previously at least two feet above water level, was now one foot under! And the walk back towards the main pathway was very boggy indeed, and we frequently lost out legs as far as our knees or even higher!!!

Great fun and truely spectacular! And a testimony to how quick water levels in wet caves can rise... we were only underground for three hours!