On a recent vacation to New Mexico, my family and I visited the famed Carlsbad Caverns. The caves are selectively lit by spots but overall the light level was extremely dim.

Being the crazy person I am, I opted to shoot with the Extreme on my XHA1. The light was so absurdly low, I had to set the shutter speed to something looney like 1/6th which gave lots of motion blur trails. I was also shooting both handheld and with my Bogen 562B monopod.

This is more experimental than my usual stuff in terms of the atmosphere and the shots...

Anyway, enough of all the superfluous explanation, let's get on with the show:

http://www.pinelakefilms.com/carlsbad.html

Hey Steven,

Why did you decide to go with the Extreme? Without it you could have opened up wider and there were only two or three shots where the shallow DOF seemed to make a difference or any sort of impact.

Was it for aesthetic reasons? I remember you saying that you liked the way your footage looked with the Extreme on the Yellowstone footage.


Thanks

Because I seem to capture something uniquely magical and special when I have the Letus attached, I'm hesitant to take it off these days. This is the first time I've been to the caves so I didn't know what to expect. I thought it would be lit more so it was darker than I anticipated. It was too late to take the Extreme off at that point.

Frankly, I like the almost ghost-like feel of the imagery.

For those who care, I redid some of the edit and did a bunch of work on the soundtrack and replaced the file. Thanks for taking a look.

I loved the effect. And not a spec of grain!

Wow, looks really clean on this end, same on a hd monitor? Was this vividrgb, or a lowlight setting?

Nice! Reminds me of all those old "Journey to the Center of the Earth/Mars/Moon type movies, although this looks more spooky/mysterious.