Serendipity Cave is an ice cave near my hometown of the Crowsnest Pass. It involves a bit of hiking, scrambling, and navigating to be able to find and because the entrance is so small it’s even tougher to find without a lot of looking. But this extra work just makes it more rewarding once you do find it.

The massive chunk of ice in the picture is near the entrance to the cave and is part of the ice floor that makes up the top level of the cave. The water that makes the reflection is actually an ice floor as well, but in the summer it melts slightly and a small layer of water forms on the surface.

Taking pictures in a cave poses some different challenges than typical adventure or landscape photography, and the biggest challenge would probably have to be that there is no light…which ends up being fairly important to take pictures. You definitely won’t catch nice light from a sunrise or sunset in a cave, so the only light that you have is the light that you bring into the cave.

You could probably use off-camera flashes if you were really eager, but every cave picture that I’ve ever taken has been simply with headlamps and flashlights. What you do need, however, is a tripod, and if possible a remote or cable-release as your lens will fog up if you breathe too close to it, so being as far away as possible from your camera when you take the picture is important.

For settings, I usually go somewhere near f/7/1, f/8.0, or f/11.0 and then I use the widest lens that I can. I use an ISO between 200 and 1000 if I can. Then a shutter speed anywhere between 10 seconds and 30 seconds. If I have a person in the photo, I try to keep the shutter speed below 10 seconds as it’s tough to sit still for longer than that. Then, it’s just a matter of experimenting and using your headlamps and flashlights to paint in the scene.

In this photo, we put a headlamp in the small hole in the ice just to my right side from where I’m sitting. It refracted through the ice and lit up the entire cave like a gigantic blue ice lantern. I then placed a few flashlights and headlamps pointing into the scene from a few other directions and played around from there. tougher to find. But this extra work just makes it more rewarding once you do find it.

The massive chunk of ice in the picture is near the entrance to the cave and is part of the ice floor that makes up the top level of the cave. The water that makes the reflection is actually ice as well, but in the summer it melts slightly and a small layer of water forms on the surface.

Taking pictures in a cave poses some different challenges than typical adventure or landscape photography, and the biggest challenge would probably have to be that there is no light…which ends up being fairly important to take pictures. You definitely won’t catch nice light from a sunrise or sunset in a cave, so the only light that you have is the light that you bring into the cave.

You could probably use off-camera flashes if you were really eager, but every cave picture that I’ve ever taken has been simply with headlamps and flashlights. What you do need, however, is a tripod, and if possible a remote or cable-release as your lens will fog up if you breathe too close to it, so being as far away as possible from your camera when you take the picture is important.

For settings, I usually go somewhere near f/7/1, f/8.0, or f/11.0 and then I use the widest lens that I can. I use the an ISO between 200 and 1000 if I can. Then a shutter speed anywhere between 10 seconds and 30 seconds. If I have a person in the photo, I try to keep the shutter speed below 10 seconds as it’s tough to sit still for longer than that. Then, it’s just a matter of experimenting and using your headlamps and flashlights to paint in the scene.

In this photo, we put a headlamp in the small hole in the ice just to my right side from where I’m sitting. It refracted through the ice and lit up the entire cave like a gigantic blue ice lantern. I then placed a few flashlights and headlamps pointing into the scene from a few other directions and played around from there.