Cody Duncan Photography: Travel, Landscape, Climbing and Life

I went underground for an hour or so this afternoon to play around with light and the ice-stalagmites in the Windloch Sackdilling cave.

The first photo is only with a single SB-800 flash remotely fired  from behind the ice.  It’s really cool how bright the ice glows.

At first I set up a couple of flashes on light stands but it was a slow process moving everything around in the dark.  So I settled with keeping one flash on the ground somewhere behind the ice and using the other light stand like a boom and holding it at various angles.  I figure I’ll go back again for some more photos and try a few new things.  I like the contrast of the ice against the darkness, but maybe I’ll shoot off a few flashes in the back of the cave to help give a bit more depth to the photos.

Will the spring ever come?

OK, this has got to be one of the coolest parade floats I’ve ever seen: a V-8 engine straight piped into a fire breathing dragon and continually revved up by some drunk dudes dressed as medieval knights. Cool!

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Over the weekend we made long journey over snow covered autobahns and horrible traffic up to a little corner of Nordrhein-Westfalen near the Dutch border. The reason: Carnival. Saturday night was spend among the costumed crowds in Cologne (home to the tallest cathedral in Germany). I’ve never been to Mardi Gras, but imagine it would be something similar, except the for the German Carnival songs that everyone is singing and dancing to the entire night.

On Sunday we went to a cool little parade in the town of Ratheim, near where we were staying.

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Tilt-shift panoramic of Schneibsteinhaus in Berchtesgaden national park as seen from Jenner.

One of those moment’s where you go to take a “quick photo” while the girlfriend waits in the car.  Not paying attention to time, you think you’ve been gone about 10 minutes when you walk back to the car only to be told you’ve been gone for 45 minutes…

It was non-stop snow from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning. Then the clouds parted and it was about as good of a day as can be asked for. Just a couple pics now, will post more in the next days. Busy researching any way possible so that I can stay in Germany. Have two weeks left to figure something out otherwise it’s plane ticket shopping…

Hohenstein is the highest point in the area so I thought I would head there after wandering around in the snowy forest on Wednesday afternoon. Hiking through knee deep snow up the path to the castle the world became thoroughly cold and the sun vanished behind the clouds as the the next snow flurry settled in. I could see Auerbach off in the distance, nice and bright and sunny. Soon enough, but not after nicely frozen hands, the sun was back out again for a few fleeting moments before winter once again took over.

Snow flurries taking over the landscape again…

Been snowing the last few days, which hasn’t made my morning drive very fun, but makes for kinda cool looking forests. The clouds have parted in the afternoon making for some nice light on the fresh snow and giving me a bit of hope to be able to do some night shooting (with snow), but as soon as it gets dark, it’s cloudy again. So it goes in Germany…

Was in Windloch Sackdilling cave again last night. Weather wasn’t so good, so the best thing to do is go underground. The ice-stalagmites have grown quite a bit and are pretty cool looking. I only had 1 SB-800 flash with me and no tripod as I wanted to keep things light while down in the cave, so I couldn’t do too much. But hopefully I can head back sometime this week with all my lighting gear (it’s pitch black, no natural light) and see what I can come up with. The ice is only in the first part of the cave, so no rappelling required to get there.

Crawling out from one of the small passages in the back of the cave.