Carlsbad Caverns was just a few miles from Guadalupe Mountains and since I couldn't do a hike in the mountains...I decided to hike through the cave. Rattlesnakes won't find me down here.

This was my first real experiment in cave photography. I've been to Mammoth Cave NP in Kentucky before but didn't have a tripod with me so the pictures weren't great. The Rangers at Carlsbad let me bring my tripod down into the cave. In fact they encourage it because that way they know you won't use the cave rocks to keep the camera stable. I experimented with long exposures in San Francisco, but cave photography was a little challenging. There is no natural light down there so you have to expose with the lighting they provide.

The below photo was shot for 30 seconds at f/7.1 ISO 200