Inside the Pink Cave

Test shot with me in the cave to give a sense of scale.

Why not spend the night in your car, then scale some precipitous cliffs in the dark in order to enter a pitch black sea cave to take a photograph before dawn? Seems like a great idea. So that’s exactly what I did one night in early September.

After 3 reconnaissance trips I had figured out the ideal conjunction of tides, weather, position, moon and sun that I needed to get the photograph I wanted. I had to have a falling tide so I wouldn’t get trapped and drown, which had fallen the right amount by 1 hour before dawn giving me a window of time to get my picture before the sun came up. Skye At Night is all about the time between sunset and sunrise, and as soon as the sun is up it’s game over.

I also needed decent weather with some cloud that would be underlit by the rising sun to give the pink glow I was after within the cave. This would reflect off the still wet surfaces of the boulders and walls of the cave to give a lovely glowing sheen to everything. That was plan A.

It all came together one fortunate night and this time I had a rope with me to help with the descent/ascent. Nothing needing a harness or anything serious (though I do have one), but more for stability and confidence.

The sea is over that ledge. No I didn’t leave the rope wedged between those rocks!

Once down the cliff there was a short and slippery leg-breaker scramble over very smooth round wet boulders and then into the cave itself. All the rocks were covered in little jumpy shrimp-type things that freaked me out when they jumped onto my hands. Eeeeuuuw. Note it was pitch darkness aside from my head torch, and spooky as anything in the cave. I had to take great care not to snap an ankle by slipping down a crevice.

I’d already been in the cave a few times during my reconnaissance trips so I had a good idea how to proceed. I’d identified a nice alignment of smaller rocks to act as a lead line along the left side. Combined with a smooth curve of the rock wall that should capture some nice reflections it was to be the main driver of the overall composition.

I had two cameras with me. My Leica Q3 which has a superb sensor and fast lens, and my Sony A7III with a 16-35mm f/2.8 lens. As well as the main composition I was targeting, I wanted to try a few others as well. With only limited time available, having two cameras on two different tripods enabled me to maximise the short time I had, given that average shutter speeds were around a minute at a time to start with.

During the day, the light outside the cave is massively brighter than inside, making it hard to get a realistic and well exposed shot even with multiple exposures. My plan was to get a nice balance between the gentle light of pre-dawn and the reflections inside the cave before the scene was overwhelmed as the sky lightened.

Lo and behold, the sky started to pink up as the clouds received the first light from the sun that was still well over the horizon. It was only when this light emerged that I was able to properly compose my main target image. I elected to use my Sony camera primarily because I wanted a 16mm focal length to get the composition right.

As is often the case in these situations, the light doesn’t last long. I just about managed to get my multiple exposures (for focal distance and lighting conditions) in before the clouds had changed and the light became much more yellowish. I had a few other compositions that were OK, but nothing as good as the main image that I’d set out to get.

Back in the editing suite, I started by blending the exposures together in Photoshop. Quite a lot of delicate masking was needed to get front-to-back sharp focus, especially amongs the rocks on the cave floor. As the focus changes, the image alignment changes slightly as well so you have to be very careful to get everything lined up properly. The sky was also somewhat brighter than inside the cave as well, but I had plenty of different exposures to play with to balance things out. Once I had a nicely balanced single flattened image, I then spent some time in Lightroom find tuning the little details, like bringing out some of the reflections on the boulders with some clarity and highlight brushing.

Overall, I’m really happy with the end result. It made all the hard work worthwhile. I do have to remind myself that anyone looking at the picture in isolation will have no idea about the location, the access difficulties and downright dangers involved in making it. That’s what makes it so memorable for me. But I’m hoping that as a single picture it stands on its own feet, and the story of its making is just a bonus.

This is the final image from the cave session. It is a multi-shot composite of 3 images to handle focus stacking and additional shots for exposure stacking. Three shots were taken focusing close in, mid distance and the clouds. Different exposures were required for to handle the brighter sky even though it was pre-dawn. Sony A7III 16mm various apertures and shutter speeds.