click to see large pano
One of the great aspects of storm chasing is seeing parts of our amazing country you otherwise wouldn’t see. The Caverns of Sonora is a great example of what I mean. It is the coolest cavern I’ve toured but didn’t know it even existed! The sad thing is that now I know about it, I probably wouldn’t travel just to see it but on a road trip, it’s a must do stop! There are tons of great treasures like this you see while your storm chasing that make the chase just that much sweeter!
You go down if I remember correctly nearly 200 vertical feet on the tour. That’s a lot of stairs cause you gotta come back up them to get out. At first, the cavern isn’t all that impressive and then all of a sudden you turn a corner and the magic appears, room after room after room! The natural beauty, the sculptures created by water and minerals is staggering! The lighting is provided by the lights for the trail which is done pretty well for our purposes (I shot in AWB the whole time) The one challenge in photographing the caverns is providing a sense of scale. You can’t touch nothin nor put anything in the frame like a coin to give you any sense of scale. I went down with just the D5 / 14-24AFS and shot the whole time at ISO 3200 and either f/2.8 or f/4. The top pano was the best way I could think of to give you a sense of scale as each individual photo of the pano was taken at 24mm so when you add that all three up, you get a sense of the physical size of this one room in the caverns. So two lessons come from this, the first is, this country has treasures everywhere and the second lesson, we need to take the time to smell the roses to treasure them all!