Congrats Josh! My first cave-cam was a similar long-zoom, small-sensor, bridge camera with full manual settings. It has served me well for years! At first, I didn’t think the super zoom would be useful in-cave but found it does the job for things far away. You can zoom to things you wish you were closer to like the owl on a ledge 10 meters up or that you wanna stay far away from like the Cobra perched up a chamber wall or the pit-viper that’s in your path.
My first suggestion was to set the focus also to manual but it seems the S2940 doesn’t have that feature. So I’d choose the Center AF mode and use a strong light to help it focus.
I would stay with the base ISO, which is 100 in your case, to keep the digital noise at its lowest. Most small sensor cams start introducing noticeable noise above its base ISO. Try the higher ISO and see if the noise is acceptable to you; I rarely shoot above the base ISO.
Since you have a good understanding of exposure, the rest is the good ole trial & error method. If you’re in the twilight zone set the cam to Program mode to see what exposure settings it suggests then use one of those as a starting setting in Manual mode.
A limitation I see is the S2940’s minimum shutter speed of 8 seconds but you can compensate with brighter light sources.
A non-setting tip is to get a diffuser for the on-cam flash to soften shadows of the subjects and to minimize/eliminate the shadow caused by the lens barrel during macro shots.
bronzzhorse wrote:Full Manual mode, with fully adjustable … Flash Intensity and Length.
How can you adjust the flash length?
Good luck, hope you’ll post your shots!