Ennis Cave Trip Report
During the week
from March 19 - 25 nine Kansas City Area Grotto, KCAG, members
met at Ennis Cave in Arkansas . We were
there on the invitation of Randy Rose, the owner, to work on two
projects. Randy came from California to work
on the construction of a third shelter house and to guide us to
spots where he needed photos for a book he is writing on Ennis.
The stay for the Kansas City crew ranged from a few days
to the full week. The KCAG participants were
Rick Hines, Jim Cooley, Shelly Field, Mark Lankford, Jonathan
Lowrey, David Mead, John McGuire, Mike Smoker, and Pic Walenta.
Randy led two 6 or
7 hour photo trips. We made another 6 hour
trip to Taj Mel Hall and several shorter trips to log about 25
hours of photo work for the week.
We visited and
photographed, the Birthday Room, the 40’ Waterfall, the 55’
Waterfall, the 100’ Waterfall, Column Hall, TimBuckTwo,
Pinocchio’s Room, P2, Taj Mel Hall, the Wave, the Womb Room, the
Camp Room, Crystal’s Room , and the Rose Rotundra.
We took about 350 photos that quickly got thinned down to
about hundred for Randy to pick from for his book.
I’ll estimate that we got about a third of the shots
Randy wants so it looks like well need another couple trips at
least. Let me know if you would like to help
on a future photo shoot.
We used a Nikon
D700 with interchangeable lens and carried as many as 16 Vivitar
285 slave flash units. The slaves were
triggered with an infrared flash on the D700.
The 100’ Waterfall Room and a few other areas required
multiple shots to cover the area of interest.
Five or six photos were merged together to form the image
of the ceiling to floor shots of the formations in the 100’
Waterfall Room (see attached photo).
A five minute video
slideshow is available on YouTube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iALdkgzQ_-0
Rick Hines |