Photographer captures incredible cave light pictures

These incredible cave light photographs capture the beauty of a hidden underwater world.

Photographer Curt Bowen uses his own technique to bring stunning detail to these unseen depths.

From Florida to the Caribbean, Curt and his team use time lapse photography and underwater lights to literally paint in the detail unseen to most of us.

In these magical photographs, the caves - which are formed in flooded limestone formations known as karst - seem to become portals to another world.

Karst topography is a landscape formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks such as limestone, dolomite, and gypsum.

It is characterised by underground drainage systems with sinkholes and caves.

Curt, who is president of the ADM Exploration Foundation, said: "I've been working on this process for about 15 years, it's all trial and error. To capture it, you kind of have to go where it is.

"To get a picture that nobody else gets of these caves is why we are here. In cave diving you can't take a lot of equipment

"I came up with a system using a normal camera and we open up the shutter for a really long time, 30 seconds or longer, and then we just use our normal cave lights as the strobe for the light.

"We take the camera and we lock it off on a tripod, it doesn't move at all, what we move is the light to paint the cave."

Curt uses underwater (HID-LED) lamps to shed light on the darkness to reveal the incredible beauty of the natural caves.

Each image requires several hours to shoot hundreds of individual time lapse images.

Curt said: "As a land photographer, I got involved in scuba diving in the early 1980s.

"The world contains many karst - limestone - regions that produce amazing caves from Florida, Bahamas, Mexico, Brazil, France, and China to name a few."

For more information on Curt and his work visit: www.curtbowen.com