The fence surrounding the house of the Speleologists’ base of the “Cyclop” club now is decorated with wonderful photographs by Viktor Lyagushkin.
“Cyclop” is a Lviv (Ukraine) speleo club which discovered Optymistychna (Optimistic) Cave (the longest gypsum cave in the world), and now continues exploration, mapping and other work in the cave.
January 2020 the correspondent of the famous Internet Magazine Bird-In-Flight went with us to the Optimistic cave. It took him almost six months to recover from horror, but finally he pulled himself together and wrote this article. Read about a thousand buckets of clay, the delight of the discoverer, a week without sunshine here.
On July 24, Nikon Ambassador Viktor Lyagushkin gave a lecture live on Nikon Ukraine Facebook. At a meeting with fans of the brand, he spoke about his current project in Optimistic Cave – the longest cave of the continent, which is located in the Ternopil region.
Victor revealed the secrets of organizing large projects, the peculiarities of shooting underground, answered questions about the new Nikon mirrorless cameras of Z series and optics for them.
From February 23 to March 13, our team of two people – Viktor Lyagushkin and Bogdana Vashchenko – worked in the Optimistic Cave, where they spent 19 days underground. We lived in the underground base camp Oasis located 12 kilometers from the exit. All this time we spent wothout seeing the sun and sky.
I must admit that it was not easy, we became very tired. It was strange to go to the surface, we had to get used to the sunlight again. And the coronavirus epidemic, which managed to spread around the world while we were underground, almost made us come back into the cave. 🙂
In the photographic sense, this expedition was extremely successful. Now we have dozens of magnificent photographs, live and new in our luggage. And all this had been shot in places of the cave that few humans saw.
It should be noted that neither this expedition, nor the project would have been possible without the active participation of the Cyclop Lviv caving club. Its members posed in the photo, helped to bring (and take out) photo and camp equipment, food, and provided all possible assistance.
Special thanks to Bogdan Markovich and Natalia Yudina for organizing expeditions and vigilant monitoring of the safety of participants.