Cave Photography

Cave photography is tricky for several reasons. This is especially true if you're trying to use the "natural" lighting that cave tours provide.

I tend to like the orange red glow of incandescent lighting, and taking pictures without a flash emphasizes my personal memory of the experience. While using a flash yields better sharpness, it also changes the lighting to something other than what you remembered seeing. However, it does show the true nature of the rock which tends to be browns and tans. Flash is nice if you're wanting to study the geological formations, but not as nice if you're wanting the feel of that memory.

1. Come Prepared

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Make sure you have a crisp-just-recharged battery or even two. These batteries take a beating in darkly lit areas - whether it's to power a flash or to power the sensor that's being exposed for hundreds of times longer than usual. Also put the largest, fastest card you've got in your camera. In those dark caverns, fumbling around with your cards is a quick way to get them lost! You don't want to open up your camera unless you really have to. What lens you use is up to you. I used a moderately slow zoom lens which took me from 3.4 to around 5. The 50mm f/1.8 might have been better, but many of those formations are so far out of reach that to close in on them you must zoom. Switching lenses during the tour increases your risk of dropping one.

2. Expect Grain

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Push your ISO to the highest setting your camera allows and disable the flash unit if you have one built in. Even if you wanted to use a lower ISO, the long exposure time will create artificial grain and distortion on digital sensors so you're going to get grain one way or another. Also expect a shallow depth of field. Push your lens to as fast as it can go by opening up to as wide an aperture as your lens allows. (Make that little f-number as low as it can get.)

3. Set To Burst

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Set your camera to take a flow of shots instead of just one while you press the shutter button. In this setting, when you take a picture (remember to be perfectly still) hold down the shutter instead of just pressing it to take two or three shots of the exact same thing. This gives you a greater chance of capturing shots like the one you see here (this was the middle shot from a stream of three).

Camera shake isn't as severely noticed in long exposures, but hand-holding a camera means it's shots will be based on your overall stability on those slippery floors. The general rule is anything longer than 1/60 of a second should be on a tripod. Of the four different caves I've gone to, you couldn't bring those in unless you have special permission. Somehow the flow of shots or burst shooting helps improve these odds.

4. Be Polite And Trail Behind

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Our guide was rather miffed at anyone who wanted to stick around to admire the view. I think she was paid by the inverse of the hour by the comments she made and the way she wanted to cattle the fifty of us through so quickly. That's another thing. These are usually large tour groups. Most people want to pay their $20 to walk through a cave quickly, learn a couple of things then spend another $20 on a T-Shirt that says they did it. They're not interested in sticking around for an hour to fully appreciate the actual geological formations. What does this mean to you as the photographer? Stay at the end of the group.

In fact, I was so far back that the tour group behind us was just a few feet away - these tours were in 15 minute intervals. I wouldn't suggest this if you were in the last tour of the day. Zoiks! Getting locked in one of these caves with all the lights out would be terrifying!

5. Seek Sensible Stability

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If there's a handrail nearby, lean on it with as much of your body as you can, and I mean squat down to the point that your arms, side and back are resting firmly on it. However, don't lean on the walls. Let me say that again ... DO NOT lean on the walls. You can be terribly fined for destroying the cave "life" by doing so.

We emit oils and acids that create a water barrier on these stones. That means the water won't settle on these spots anymore to deposit the minerals that keep these formations "alive". I think the fine here was around $15,000!

6. Protect Your Assets

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Did I mention slippery floors? That camera strap better be around your neck. I usually have a small padded camera bag that fits around my shoulder at just the right height for the camera to rest in between shots while it's still strapped to my neck. That way if I fall on my camera, it's protected. I forgot that case on this visit, but it's still good advice.

7. Remember Variety

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Take pictures of formations up close and far back. The popcorn photo shows so much detail because I was zoomed into it and only 18 inches from it. Those things are small. Formations often look different looking back. Look up. Look down. Look behind you. Each of these are often missed photo opportunities and in most caves you'll notice differentiations in the lighting that could make wonderfully appealing shots that would otherwise be missed.

8. Be Liberal With Your Photography

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Be patient and take lots of pictures and at the highest resolution your camera allows. Out of about 200 pictures, only 20 of them came out with a decent level of sharpness. That's only a 10% success rate. Some great formations could be discerned from the multiple identical shots of them, but not appreciated because of their blurriness.

9. Last words of wisdom? Hmmm...

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Deep in the cave where the wind doesn't blow, it's hot. Dress cool. Wear good tennis shoes.

If I were to do this again, it would be by myself instead of with a family of kids and relatives. It's an inconvenience to them. I'd warn the tour guide that I'm a shutterbug so I lag behind, then offer a small tip - like $5 or $10 in advance. In American Indian tours, they usually take a $20 - but a good Indian guide is easily worth that ... some of the great shots in my Antelope Canyon trip were a direct result of advice from the guide! I would also ask the manager what types of accommodations could be made or if there were any special photography tours.

10. Final Words and Thanks

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My mother in law was very gracious in buying our tickets. It was an expense she didn't need to take, but it also created some great memories with the kids that they'll talk about for years to come. I wanted to take some good pictures for the challenge and so that years down the road they could see them and recall that first whiff of cool cave air when they were still young.

Will Blog For Food

I love it when people blog and use the photography I post up on flickr. This has got to be one of the best uses of flickr around, and as long as people aren't posting my silly mug up on posterboards or commercials without my consent I have practically no concern on the matter. Some of my photos have even been on pages supporting political groups that I don't, but it was clear from the article that the photo was used to set a visual tone rather than to say that the photographer promoted the material.

The latest blog to use one of my photos is Alan Morantz's Leading Thoughts. In this article he discusses how art can be used to develop leadership skills! Cool! That's actually one of the reasons for the many photographs up on flickr and blogposts lately. I'm trying hard to learn a certain level of diligence that will hopefully lead to better leadership and organizational skills. I'm also trying to put something creative out there that can be used to enrich the world and bring happiness to others. I'm not good enough to make blogging or photography a full-time business, but someday I might learn some great hidden nugget of wisdom and become a world-renown motivational speaker to twelve-year-olds that will allow me to indulge in supplimenting the task with photography and blogs. Then again, reality tells me I should get back to work - lunch break is over!

Geo Tagging

It's no secret that I think flickr is one of the best things the internet has to provide. A few months back they got better by adding geo-tagging maps. It's a mashup between Yahoo Maps (a rip off of Google Maps) and its own API.

Although it has some privacy issues for cameras that automatically GeoTag their photos, it's a windfall for people who see a great photo or even a lousy photo of a great place and want to explore more in depth.

For example, someone takes a picture of a great plating of food at a restaurant. You see that photo and think... that would be fun to go to ... and now you know where it is, too.

A year ago you had to use terse tools which created machine tags in your photos - those were messy and unstable. Now that it's been solid in Flickr for half a year it's worth noting how simple and solid geo-tagging can be.

The only complaint I have is that Yahoo doesn't always report the correct location in your photo details, but it still shows up fine on the map.

So every public photo taken at a specific location other than my house has been geo-tagged for your enjoyment.

Check out what others have Geo-Tagged.

The creative photographer

Joseph O. Holmes | AMNH

Where there are thousands of fantastic photographers there are hundreds of thousands of amateurs who have taken fantastic photographs. I've had to think a bit lately about what separates the two. Some very well established photographers have posted work up on Flickr or on their personal site that I thought - ehhh, that's okay. Likewise, some very average photographers have posted some striking photos on Flickr that draw my admiration.

What is it that gives a photo that "WOW" factor? I think it's the ability to give notice to things and move us by visuals that nearly everyone else takes for granted. It is also the ability to tell a story in a unique way, such as Carl Iwasaki's famous photo of teenagers going steady. Sometimes it's an unexpected gamble that produces a photograph, like Phitar's photo: salomé spinning. Sometimes it's just seeing a detail in the environment that others overlook.

I could try to imitate, but that only takes me as far as being a good imitator. It seems that in photography, using a fresh approach is what gives any shot the potential. That frustrates me because I feel so stale - writer's-block, inhibition, whatever you wish to call it.

Joseph O. Holmes' gallery of photos of people staring at African veldt dioramas is an extraordinary example of a good artistic result. (These pictures somehow remind me of a related Ray Bradbury story.) It would be amazing to delve into his brain with a few questions: What made him think to do this series (AMNH)? Did he naturally envision the result and go for it, or did it strike him at the moment? Was he inspired to do this work, and if so, what inspired him? Is this an imitation of another piece of art that he's seen? Whatever his answers might be to some of these questions, I think we can all agree that he well deserves the $650 a-piece that each of these photographs sell for.

Poughkeepsie Journal Article on Joseph O. Holmes

Not Yet Flickr Favorites

Every once in a while I come up with what I think would be a totally cool idea. Maybe one out of twenty of those times do I actually spring for it.

Flickr is amazing. It's API is moderately impressive, too. I thought: "What if I could go through all the tags of all my favorite photos up on flickr, ordered them by popularity, then did a search for photos that matched the top X tags in that list?"

I expected to discover some incredible art that would be right in line with what I already enjoyed. BTW - what is it that I enjoyed?

First, I discovered that flickr can only handle searches up to 20 tags. Any more than that and you get back zip - zilch - nada. Doesn't matter if any photo in their database actually contains all 21 tags - you get nothing back.

Second, I discovered that some people out there have over 150 tags on the photos of which only 2 tags might apply. As a result, when searching by relevance you get these over-tagged photos in the list along with the worthy ones.

Blame the upload tools. They don't ask the user to tag each photo, but rather to list out all the tags used for the batch of photos being uploaded. Non-savvy users might batch upload a photograph of a donkey and another of a stop sign. Given only one box for all photos to list their tags they would enter something that places stop-sign related tags on the donkey and vice-versa.

All the same - try the tool out, it actually does a shot-gun result of what I hoped for. Try sorting by "interestingness, descending" for the most polished works first, then try the others for works that are "sleepers" (fantastic photos that are uploaded while people are dozing off, and therefore rarely discovered).

Not Yet Flickr Favorites

In the Raw

Nine years ago when I purchased my first SLR I was anxious to learn about the technique and composition that makes great photos. One common advice was to shoot as much film as you could, taking notes with each shot, and learn from experience by comparing notes with the prints that would sometimes take days to process.

The adage "film is cheap" appeared everywhere from photography magazines to course books. The problem for me was, as we were entering the digital age, film wasn't really cheap. Before they did digital transfers, you would easily pay $4 for a roll of decent 24 exposure film and an additional $8 at the drug store for development and 4x5 prints. That made each shot 50 cents a pop. When they started offering the photographs to be scanned on CD it rose to about 70 cents per picture.

The final insults came when I had a running streak of about a dozen developed rolls with CDs from various places - Wolf Photo / Ritz Photo, Walgreens, Walmart and Target - all come back with either scratches on the negatives, poorly developed film or hair and dust on the digital transfers. Surprisingly, the Walmart one-hour photo was the best of all the developers. Nevertheless most of the developers' environments were dirty and they often didn't bother to change their chemicals like they were supposed to.

There was a considerable amount of buzz about how photo development establishments were going under because of the digital age. In reality, they were cutting so many corners that their quality went down. Instead of meeting the lowered demand by raising their quality or lowering their prices they rose their prices and kept the same low quality. Although switching to digital was expensive at first, it has more than paid for itself in the lack of development costs alone. For those who are interested, the breakpoint was at around picture #2143.

Because of the high costs, slack treatment of the negatives and poor customer service received from one establishment after another, switching to digital photography wasn't as much about convenience as it was about empowerment.

If celluloid film was "cheap", digital film is downright dirt cheap. Shooting 6 MP RAW with low res JPEG only eats up 7 megabytes per picture. That's over 140 pictures per Gigabyte card. A very fast 1-GB Compact Flash card today runs around $45 on Amazon. That's the same as just 3 rolls of film with developing and digital transfer, but it holds as much as nearly 6 (24 exposure) rolls on one card. The card literally pays for itself half-way through being filled with RAW images.

RAW has many advantages over JPEG. It's often likened to a digital negative. It is usually proprietary to the camera maker (E.G. Nikon, Cannon, etc) but RAW format readers such as Adobe Photoshop CS2, Apple iPhoto or the free Pixmantec Rawshooter Essentials can handle just about any RAW format you throw at it. Because a RAW file contains so much more data than its JPEG counterpart it can give the photographer more leniency when the settings aren't just perfect and can provide some other surprising advantages. For example you can change settings in "Nikon Capture 4" then tag certain settings you like and build on top of it with differently tagged settings. When you find certain settings that you like you can then export the RAW image into a more common JPEG format for distribution. You can also swap back and forth between tagged settings. Doing this neither removes nor changes the data in the file that was actually captured from the digital sensor. JPEGs, on the other hand, are said to degrade in quality each time they are re-saved.

The only problem I see with RAW is that because of its size, it slows down the camera by filling up the buffer more quickly; it can reduce your frames-per-second rate. It can also be slow to transfer to the computer. However, the advantages outweigh that inconvenience. When haven't we accidentally left some goofy white-balance setting on the camera and taken some great shots only to find out later what happened? JPEG files would leave you spending hours in Photoshop trying to correct the color cast damage. RAW images can remove the white balance with a 2-second flip of a switch.

There's also a gradual move into High Dynamic Range (HDR) monitors. When they become more accessible, who wouldn't want to see their photographs in richer detail than before? In this case, the data being saved in RAW is more advanced than the displays and possibly more detailed than most high quality prints.

For those who aren't quite as good at the technical aspects of photography as they are with the artistic composition, RAW could save their day. Programs such as Photoshop CS2 allow you to remove the white balance setting without losing any data. JPEGs lock the bad light temperature cast in the pixel data where it simply can't be removed. RAW can arguably even help with bad exposure since it has a much higher dynamic range that can be pulled from the file; the higher dynamic range of RAW even allows you to create the popular multi-exposure high dynamic range (HDR) images seen throughout flickr.


Finally, looking into the technology of the near future, those who have locked themselves in the lower dynamic range of JPEGs may regret not going RAW as others who have are able to tout how much more amazing their [RAW] photo taken two years ago looks on the new HDR technology.

The nature of photography is similar to that of the medical profession - it's a practice... it's always a practice. Those who say "real pros" don't need RAW since "real pros" get the shot right to begin with don't know what they're talking about. I've asked numerous paid photographers to discover that they sit on either side of the RAW/JPEG fence just as much as we amateur hobbyists photographers do.

Additional Links:
More about using the RAW format.
Excellent Unbiased Reviews about digital cameras and equipment.
Flickr photo sharing community. Who could ask for more?
Learn to take great photos.
Free Pixmantec RawShooter | essentials 2006 (Windows Only).
Read more about HDR.
Tutorial to pulling HDR effects off of a single RAW image and off of multiple images in Photomax.
Various tutorials on building HDR images in Photoshop CS2.

Think About It

Among the myriad of monuments and museums in Washington D.C. there is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Its message is begging to be understood but in a twist of irony the museum itself is a practice against civil liberties for the very same government-centralized and abusive-capitalizing concepts that were outlined in Mein Kampf itself.

Although there are pamphlets at the information desk and signs posted outside the building that emphasize the importance of spreading the knowledge, the museum refuses to empower you to do so. Copyright laws prohibit you from photographing any of the artifacts within the museum.

That's right - I said artifacts. You can't photograph the Nazi SS uniforms, the exhibit showing hundreds of victims' shoes, the reproduction artwork from the Jewish kids while they waited in the ghettos. Although these artifacts in and of themselves are not copyrighted, large poster size photographs that hang throughout the museum are. The most notable one being from Time. So because a few large posters hang in the museum, by which the story could be told well enough without, nobody is allowed to take photographs of the artifacts. Not surprisingly, you can purchase a photo book of the artifacts in the museum store.

It's insulting that our civil rights are stripped away from United States soil - not a privately operated museum, but one that our tax dollars pay for - in a museum that in itself is warning about the dangers that abound when similar liberties are forgone. You can't photograph certain touching artifacts then blog about them or show them as proof to some ignorant nazi supremist nut who claims it never happened. All because Time Life magazine says so.

Another volunteer thought that photography might be forbidden because the artifacts are light sensitive, but every artifact I could find was either rock, metal, wood, clay, cloth or a replica of paper-based items.

Furthermore, it didn't always used to be this way. Back in the summer of 2001, I remember visiting the museum and seeing many people wandering around taking flash photos. Flashes seemed to flow in a steady stream towards the replica of the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate that once hovered over the entrance of Auschwitz-Birkenau and inside the small rail-car where as many as 100 people were coerced into a journey to their slaughter.

The clay sculpture of one of the five Auschwitz-Birkenau killing grounds was particularly moving. If you want to see it, you can come visit the museum or buy the book. There are a couple of photos on the USHMM web site (here and here), but other than that you'd be hard pressed to find any photos of it anywhere else. There are, however, some other very good exhibits that have been placed (in part) online for the public to research and learn from. Sadly, several of them appear to be geared more towards trying to sell prints than to educate the public of the atrocity that the museum claims to do.

Quite frankly, the exhibits were so poorly lit that it took twice as long to read the information cards and much of the detail in the artifacts became lost in the deep shadows. Taking a picture of anything would require a decent flash setup and a tripod.

Even photographing the outside of the building, guards came up to me and forced some to be erased. Inside the building, the people at the help desk were more generous and allowed me to take a few pictures of the hall and a few more of the children's wall. Just not the exhibits.

I jokingly suggested to someone that the guards should dress up like SS men in full Nazi uniform to emphasize both the intentional unnerving and prison like Museum, as it's designed to put you in the shoes of the desperate Jews, and their intentional unnerving prison like presence. However, the guards are neither brutal nor rude (I didn't want to oppose them out of concern that they wouldn't allow me to visit the museum). The uniforms would probably stir controversy and cause the security officers grief, so in hindsight the suggestion wasn't appropriate.

Across the street I could take pictures of the entryway to my heart's content. One of the guards mentioned that there wasn't anything they could do about that, so I'm thinking the way they reacted couldn't possibly be for security reasons. A 20x zoom easily focused in on their "top secret" conveyor belts, metal detectors and uniforms (sarcastic tone intended). Even one of the volunteers at the help desk suggested that the guards are over-reacting.

The architecture of the building is very deliberate. Beautiful on one hand, foreboding on the other.

As poor as the interior lighting was, it enhanced the surrounding metal beam and mortar factory architecture and gave a more solemn and ominous feel throughout the museum. It's an amazing experience - but an experience that's sadly constrained to those few people who are fortunate enough to visit the museum in person.

Here's where I see some of the basis of the irony:

One of Hitler's statements in Mein Kampf entailed how the bourgeoisie, the Jewish and the bought-off politicians fought for the centralization of all utilities and independent states into a singular German national power "in order to have in its hands the means and pledges for an unlimited policy of fulfillment". He emphasizes that these Jewish influenced leaders and spokesmen wanted their own sense of liberty and comfort at the cost of creating one large Marxist Socialization of the people under one centralized overbearing government to maintain their oppressive "Jewish-Democratic" Reich.

That these same concepts of centralization and oppression that Hitler pinned on the Jews and political parties appear prevalent in the United States government today under the guise of protection from terrorists; Basic civil rights are being ignored and innocent civilians acting on right written in our Constitution are being pined and are undergoing prosecution while other obvious hateful crimes are being protected under the same civil laws. Through imposing copyright restrictions and invasive searches this museum mocks itself through the very same capitalist copyrights and security that Hitler proposed the third Reich should overpower (and to a greater extent imposed through brutality).

In another portion of Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote:

The responsibility for this situation is to be attributed solely to those parties who preach unceasingly to the patient electoral masses on the necessity of maintaining the autonomy of the federal states, while at the same time they champion and demand of the Reich a policy which must necessarily lead to the suppression of even the very last of those so-called 'sovereign' rights.

Translation:
The government is saying that they are protecting your interest by suppressing your civil rights.

Hitler was very much for capitalistic power and used many capitalist ideas to jab at all Jews, including patents and copyrights.

V I C XI: [The Jew] begs for 'patents' and 'privileges,' which the lords, always in financial straits, are glad to give him for suitable payment. [...] A true blood-sucker that attaches himself to the body of the unhappy people and cannot be picked off.

Hitler also emphasized the importance and effectiveness of culture over politics. Once something becomes ingrained as part of a nation's culture it's accepted among the public, While something of political standpoint is more often refuted.

V II C X: It is certain that in the future the importance of the individual [states] will be transferred to the sphere of our cultural policy.

In this case our culture involves invasive and arguably ineffective searches and confiscation at airports, museums and even our homes without warrants or court orders. Horribly abusive capitalist powers use copyright laws to oppressed the public. In a true capitalist society, people would have the power to put down these organizations. America shifted focus some time back to where there are more laws, and stronger laws to protect the businesses than to protect the people.

While works should be protected and artists, inventors and creators should be rewarded, such witch hunts that the RIAA is notoriously known for and antics such as the Sony-BMG root-kit does more harm than good.

My overall desire and suggestion for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is to lift its photography restrictions - that all suppliers of artifacts and photographs within the museum sign a waver specific to the museum that allows for visitors to photograph freely - to truly promote the goodwill intent of the museum; Let the museum show the horrors that happen when basic human liberties are crushed in an environment that doesn't degrade the very same basic liberties that our founding fathers already fought and died for.

One of those very founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, is credited to saying "Those who would give up ESSENTIAL LIBERTY to purchase a little TEMPORARY SAFETY, deserve neither LIBERTY nor SAFETY."