Caving and Diving in the Languedoc-Roussillon

This footage was all taken from a recent trip to the South of France (near Montpellier). You can read more about the trip itself here and here.

I came back with loads of great material from a variety of different caves from the small and squeezy (Event de Rodel) to the gigantic (Gourneyras). Hopefully, I’ll break this all out into some separate short films at some point, but I wanted to give a brief flavour of everything first, so edited together a teaser video showing (very briefly) most of the caves we dived (and walked, crawled and climbed) in.

Like the last film, the underwater footage is all shot with a Canon 550D running Magic Lantern. On-camera lighting is double 18W HIDs and off-camera is Aditech Mangrove VC-4L6 LEDs lights. This time, we strapped two of the Mangroves together and created one 8,000 lumen light. Output was probably down because of the gels I had added to try and balance the colour temperature to the HIDs which run hotter, but it was still pretty awesome. Even so, in the cavernous space of the Gourneyras, it was barely sufficient to get a decent exposure, even with the camera cranked up to 1600 ISO (as high as I dared). That said, the 10mm fish on the Canon does capture all of the cave and we (nearly) lit it wall-to-wall, so I was pleased.

It’s quite a brisk-paced edit, to put it mildly, so hang on to your hats and don’t blink or you might miss it!