Es Torrent de Pareis, Mallorca
(March 2001)Cueva Negra,
Asturias, Spain (September 2001)Last updated 11th January 2002
For information about the UK Cave Photography Group see caves.org.uk/photography/
The page you are reading now is about 200K in size, once all the thumbnails have loaded. However, you should be able to start reading it before it has all downloaded. Click on the thumbnails to see a larger image. Ive tried to keep the images small, so there is some quite heavy JPEG compression on some of them; and the finer detail in the photos may have been lost.
Es Torrent de Pareis, Mallorca
(March 2001)Cueva Negra,
Asturias, Spain (September 2001)
Scroll on down for general caving photos.
COPYRIGHT © David Gibson 2000. David Gibson owns the copyright in the computer files that comprise this web site publication. Additional copyright in the text, photographs or images may reside with other authors. The copyright owners assert their Moral Rights under the Design, Copyright and Patents Act 1988. Reproduction of part or all of the contents of any of these Web pages is prohibited except to the extent permitted in this notice unless prior agreement has been obtained from the copyright owners. These Web pages may be downloaded onto a hard disk or printed for your personal use provided that you include all copyright statements and that you make no alterations to any of the pages and that you do not use any of the pages in any other work or publication in whatever medium stored. No part of these pages may be distributed or copied for any commercial purpose.
Photo Salon: Hidden Earth 2000Poster display: Hidden Earth 2000Photos 1998-1999 (including tiling)Processed
'Diver' shots, entered in HE97 competitionEarly experiments with tilingPhotography, Art ... or Cheating?
My
High Performance Flashgun Slave UnitBook Review - a review of a really poor book on digital
photography
Photos: Es Torrent de
Pareis, Mallorca (March 2001)Photos: Cueva Negra, Asturias, Spain (September
2001)
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| Rowten Caves (66K). (1998) | Crystals 'near Malham' (37K) | Processed fluting from Rowten Caves (71K) .(1999) |
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| Fluted boulder in Browgill Cave (39K) | Crystals 'near Malham' (46K) | Processed fluting (not entered in competition) (80K) |
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| Mined sea cliff at Winspit, near Swanage (25K) | Alum Pot from Dolly Tubs (12K) | Alum Pot from Dolly Tubs (14K) |
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| Jingling Pot, Kingsdale. Nick Thorne about to descend. (30K) | Jingling Pot, Kingsdale. Andy Coulson entering the Lateral Cleft route. (30K) |
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| Fluting from Rowten Caves, digitally processed to create a 'wallpaper' pattern. (30K) - Second Prize | Lake Cave, Western Australia (25K) |
Perhaps this doesn't count as cave "life", though it was alive once. The rock sample is from Pasture Gill Pot, Langstrothdale. This compound coral is common in carboniferous limestone. The image immediately below-left is a stereo pair (see instructions below). The bottom two images were not entered in the competition: they are close-ups obtained by simply placing the rock on my flat-bed scanner.
Unlike conventional stereo pairs, the right-eye image appears on the left here, so you cannot use a conventional viewing technique.
View the screen at a comfortable distance and squint with your eyes crossed, so there are three images equally spaced side-by side. Now try to 'catch' the middle one and focus on it. This gets easier with practice.
If you have problems, these more detailed instructions may (or may not) work for you: View the screen at a comfortable distance and hold your finger about a third of the way to the screen, in front of your nose and below the images. now focus on your finger and move it towards or away from you until you can see a single blurred image directly behind it. Now refocus on this image and it should pop into 3D. If you have difficulties try moving further away.
Once mastered, you will find this technique of putting the right-eye image on the left easier to view than conventional stereo pairs. It has the advantage of being usable with photographs that are spaced further apart than your eyes - e.g. anything from enprints to posters. Unfortunately, it has the potential to completely destroy your ability to view conventional stereo pairs unaided. This is one of a number of methods of stereoscopic viewing that I have been experimenting with. Others involve using glasses with a large prismatic component.
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| Stereoscopic photo (reversed image - see above) of Lithostrotion Coral Colony (39K) - First Prize | (29K) |
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| Images from flatbed scanner showing partially etched specimen. Scale marker shown. (both 39K). (not entered in competition) | |
These photos were not entered in the competition, but were placed on display.
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| "More people have been to the moon". (21K). (1998). Composite image: digitally processed rock fluting; diver courtesy of John Cordingley. Title from Steve Thomas's CD of the same name. | "Southport is so BCRAcing". (20K).
(1998) Composite poster for Hidden Earth 1998 (not used for advertising). Jolly Caver played by Chris Danilewicz. Original Idea by John Wilcock. |
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| Magazine advert for Hidden Earth 99. (49K). Composite image with photos by Andy Ive, Andy Jackson and Richard Rushton. | Poster for Hidden Earth 98. (36K). Photograph of a painting by Robin Gray. |
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| Fluting in Rowten Caves (49K). displayed at HE98 (not entered in competition) | Fluting in Rowten Caves (58K). displayed at HE98 (not entered in competition) | Tiled Fluting, Feb. 1999 |
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| Diver (28K) | Diver (50K) | Diver (33K) | Diver (92K) |
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| Diver (92K) | Diver (41K) | Diver (48K) | Diver (51K) |
Early Experiments with tiling |
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Anyone who has printed their own black & white photographs will be familiar with the "dodging" and "burning" technique used to control the density of the print. You may have used other special effects such as printing onto lithographic film, sandwiching positive and negative films together to produce an edge effect, and using a carefully registered film pack to obtain "posterisation". Gerry Wooldridge has used this technique - his pictures have appeared at BCRA conferences and in Caves & Caving.
Many of the traditional darkroom techniques are migrating into image-processing software that will run on home computers. This allows the artist-photographer a much greater scope in the design of his image. This should not be seen as "cheating" - the techniques are still those of the "darkroom". A parallel would be that a work of literature is no less important because it has had the benefit of a computer thesaurus, spell-checker and grammar checker; it still needs creative skills from the writer.
The computer equivalent of dodging and burning-in should be perfectly acceptable, but what of the more subtle ways we can alter an image? Blemishes - even entire unwanted objects - can be removed from the image. The image can be sharpened or softened at will, and these effects can be applied without the audience (or competition judges!) realising (provided you use a high resolution scan and a continuous tone output device). Is this acceptable?
Some image-processing software allows the user to "convert" a photograph into a painting. You can create impressionist or pointillist brush strokes, canvas, charcoal, pen and ink, embossing, motion blur, stained glass and other effects. These are largely gimmicks; but suppose you use some "painting-by-numbers" software to create a template from your photograph and, subsequently, a painting? Is this "art" - of course it is! But will it be accepted by traditionalists? This dilemma is not new - the techniques of bromoil and bromo-etch, where a "painting" is built up on a photo-sensitive substrate were common fifty years ago, and are still used by artists today.
To demonstrate software image processing I have created some pictures based on a B&W photograph I took in 1981 of Julian Griffiths about to dive the sump in Little Hull Pot. The photograph was badly exposed, shaken and out of focus; and the diver was obscured by clouds of steam. The photo has no artistic or technical merit! On the computer the shadow exposure was raised considerably and, by adjusting the exposure in the mid-tones, the effect of the steam could be minimised. The image was sharpened (whereupon the camera-shake became more evident!). I should have painted out some hairs that were on the negative: let's say I left them in to show you what could be removed! The "special effects" were created by doing electronically what could also have been done in a darkroom, given enough time and patience. I did not use the built-in software "effects" but, for the most part, painstakingly adjusted contrast, colour palette, hue and saturation to achieve the effects I was looking for. I worked with a fairly low-resolution image, (only 800 by 1200 pixels) in order to speed up the processing, but the individual pixels are still almost too small to see - the graininess you can see in places is mostly deliberate.
Two effects I have not yet experimented with, but which you might like to try yourself, are:
(1). Take a colour picture using three flashguns, with RGB filters. Having scanned the image into your computer you can generate B&W "separations" of the images from each source of illumination. You can then adjust the contrast, brightness etc of the three images in order to obtain the ideal foreground exposure and combination of lighting - something which takes a good deal of skill to do underground. It is then trivial to combine the images with precise registration to produce the final B&W photograph. For the best results you will have to choose the colour of the subject carefully; it might be better to use cyan, magenta and yellow filters, but the subsequent tweaking will require a little more thought.
(2). Some graphics software allows you to create a "tile" from an image, from which you can produce a so-called "wallpaper pattern" for your computer screen or Web site - or, photocopied onto dozens of sheets of paper, as a backdrop for your caving club stand. Try taking a photograph of the scallopping pattern on rock or sediment, sharpening and blending it electronically, and using this as the basis for a tile. [As you can see - I have now tried out this technique and used it on the background to this web page, 1/11/98]
This article first appeared in Underground Photographer, Issue 8, Winter 1997.
For information about the UK Cave Photography Group see caves.org.uk/photography/