Glow Worms!

I think it’s pretty safe to say that caves are one of the most hostile environments you could take camera equipment into, yet here I am, again…

Photo Luke Tscharke

Filming glow worms isn’t an easy undertaking, there are various ways to do it depending on what you’re trying to achieve, as you’re normally utilising different types of time-lapse in some way each shot generally takes a very long time to complete so time management is one of the big challenges, especially on short shoots, planning shots throughly is important and it’s not uncommon to be shooting round the clock to take advantage of different light conditions.

Photos: Jonathan Esling and Ian Stewart during Attenbrough’s Light on Earth shoot.

The cave environment is perhaps the biggest challenge though, it’s humid, cold, prone to flooding and filled with fine silt mud, dust and water, pretty much the worst place you could take anything electrical, then there’s the physical risk to people which has in the past ended in tragedy. It’s not the kind of place you want to be spending time in alone. The crew need to be the types that can deal with being cold and uncomfortable, it helps if they’re technical wizards because things will go wrong and you’re a long way away from a workshop or even phone reception, it also goes without saying that you all need to get along! If you can find crew with these traits it’ll be a good shoot.

Some of the most awe inspiring moments in my life have been in caves, I can vividly remember at midnight one summer lying on a slab of cool stone in the entrance of a cave waiting for a shot to finish. The glow from the glow worms was so bright I could easily make out the shape of my hand and various different areas of the cave, the hum of insects could be heard in the forest outside and the stream burbling away into the depths of the cave sounded like distant voices, which admitedly was a bit freaky, but I’ll talk about the sort of hallucinations that caves bring on in another post.