Luray Caverns

Author's Comments

The caverns are the opposite of everything I usually photograph. No sky, no weather, no hour of day to wait out. The light is fixed where someone decided to put it forty years ago, and it does not move. You adjust to that or you do not make the picture. What I found, the time I spent an afternoon down there with a tripod I was not supposed to have set up and a wide lens pressed close to my chest, is that the caverns ask a different kind of attention. The formations are architecture in the most literal sense - columns, vaults, buttresses - except the architect was water moving through limestone for a few hundred million years. That frame of mind helps. So does ignoring the crowds, which are considerable and constant, and finding the thirty seconds between tour groups when a chamber empties and you can hear the drip that is still doing the work. Dream Lake is the photograph everyone knows and the reason is simple. The water is shallow and perfectly still, and the stalactites above double into stalagmites that do not exist. The ceiling becomes a floor. I have seen people walk past it in ninety seconds. Give it fifteen minutes. Let your eyes adjust. The reflections only read properly when you crouch low enough that your lens is nearly at water level. Bring the widest lens you own and push the ISO further than you are comfortable with. The grain does not hurt these images. If anything, it suits them. There is something honest about a slightly rough photograph of a place that has been in the dark this long.

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