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Some friends and I visited Florida Caverns this past Friday. This is the only publicly-accessible non-submerged cave system in the state. I'd been there on a couple of occasions previously, but was anxious to try some of my new (new to me, anyway) gear down there in the dark. Flash photography is permitted, but I wanted to try using my Sigma 30mm 1.4 on my D7000 with some insane ISO so I could use just the effect lights they had in the cave. I used shutter-priority 1/30th and ISO 3200, and the exposures ranged from f:1.4 to f:3.5, with one "brightly" lit space stopping down all the way to f:6.3.
Comparing to some pictures from my previous visits, I like the colors better on the available-light images, as it allowed the color of their lighting to show, where flash overpowered everything with white light. Flash also penetrated into background areas that were not lit by the cavern's display lights, so these stay truer to their intended presentation, as it were.
Descending the zig-zag path downward from the entrance:
They call this the wedding cake, and the columns that make the back wall are called the pipe organ.
This space was called the fracture room. The large column near the center, along with many of the smaller ones, were broken and a gap formed when the floor settled into empty space being washed out beneath it.
Flowstone formations
Another fracture space
A flowstone formation they call the cathedral.
The Christmas Tree room. The center of the space (left side of this image) is filled with a large section of rock that dropped from the ceiling an estimated 3,000 years ago. They've lit it with the Christmas green and red colors
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