Cave Exploration in Spain

Spent a week over Easter on a caving expedition in Cantabria, Northern Spain in the Matienzo valley. This is the first time I have tried to take all my cave photography gear abroad via budget airline, but it proved possible due to the unlimited weight hand luggage policy of Easyjet. We just about managed to fit our caving, camping and photographic gear into our baggage allowance and had a fantastic week hunting for new caves and searching for new passages in known caves.

The Matienzo expeditions have been running for well over 30 years, and details of the discoveries in the area can be found on the Matienzo Expedition Website.

I took a lot of record photographs of cave entrances and surface features, but also managed to get some nice landscape pictures and a few underground pictures of some of the new discoveries during the week. This was the first time I have tried my hand at panoramic pictures, both above and below ground. The views down on the valley lent themselves well to this format, as did one of the major cave discoveries. I took several frames of each of these scenes, and then used Adobe Photoshop to create the composite images from the best matching ones. Each of the images below is made up from three actual photographs.

Early morning cloud in the Matienzo valley

Cave chamber in the newly discovered Cueva del Torno