Cavechat.org

Fake meaning the lighting angles conflict with each other to such a degree that it throws the overall image off and gives it the manipulated look from all the give and take in post. In other words making a picture look fake and not as natural as it should be. Sorry for the confusion ;-)

Since we're on the topic, I want to mention the CD produced by John Woods entitled "On Three: A guide to digital photography for cavers". In it, there's a great example of a many-layered digital image taken in Sequoia Crystal Cave. The room itself has several different light sources with a great variety of kelvin temperatures. There are several flash illuminated portions as well. Since this image was taken before RAW became the accepted format, the white balance was set before each of the images was captured. In any case, there are many different layers that have all blended together beautifully into a seemless image.

The CD explains and profusely illustrates all the techniques involved. Contact me at pjcaver@gwi.net for more info the CD. Lots of great information about cave photography in general and digital cave photography in particular. See me at convention as well on Vendors Row.

Peter
pjcaver

John Woods article on Digital layering of cave photos is here http://www.itsdarkinhere.us/

Mark Passerby, Caves.com

Yup, that's the chapter in the CD. Imagine how good the rest of the CD is! Thanks for letting us know.

pjcaver

javascript:emoticon(':doh:')
"all blended together beautifully into a seemless image."

Make that "seamless"

Peter

I saw people talking about using Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro to stitch together multiple photos. There is a program called the Gimp (http://www.gimp.org). It works great and it is free software. It works under most UNIX systems and Windows.

The original poster asked about stitching multiple photos together. Here is a photo of Fantastic Pit that I stitched together using the Gimp:

http://flickr.com/photos/masneyb/274211 ... 319758539/

Brian

Is this the same cave as is on the front of Alpine Caving Techniques? http://www.caves.org/section/vertical/nh/47/alpine.html

Which would be funny as I thought Alpine Caving Techniques began life written in French and was only recently translated I guess I assumed it was a european cave

Very Nice photo by the way I don't know about the bottom needing more light I reckon cave photos look good when they are sort of framed in darkness.

Yep Fuzzy, thats the same Fantastic Pit (Nice shot by the way Brian)As for another free (well demo) stiching program, Autostitch is a really neat program. Very little interface but what it does it does really well. I was shooting in GSP in Kentucky and didn't have a wide enough lens for a certain shot. I ended up shooting the scene in a series of 4 quads. I used the autostitch to merge the 4 images together. It was very quick and painless. This room is labled the Chapel on the GSP map and was created from 4 seperate images all lit by a single unfocused 3 watt luxeon led.
http://www.realmsofreality.net/caves/gsp_tr1/gsp_tr1b/slides/chapel.html
http://www.autostitch.net