Carlsbad Caverns Vacation

[KD5NRH]

Well, the caverns aren't exactly outdoors, but they're nature of a sort...

There are a lot more, but these are the ones that caught my eye when I started going through the SD cards from the Canon S2IS. Most have little to no PP, including cropping, other than the scaling to avoid taking all night to get them on Flickr. Suggestions for PP and for getting the photos themselves better next time appreciated.
There are also some B&W film shots that I've got scanned, but haven't put on Flickr yet. I'll try to remember to get the best on there sometime soon.


Somewhere in the Big Room: I took as many shots in there as possible using the ambient light with 1-10 second exposures, usually with the tripod folded and jammed between my boot and the handrail. They look pretty flat with on-camera flash, and re-creating the lighting effects they've set up in there would take a lot of strobes and trained monkeys to place them.


Another shot from the Big Room.


This has to be one of my favorites from the Big Room. I don't know that I would have chosen a green gel for that light, but I have to admit it makes a nice dramatic effect.


I thought I had a shot of this with flash for comparison, but I can't find it. Suffice it to say that the lighting really makes the shot here.

A few more at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kd5nrh/sets/72157606522216138/

This is definitely a place I'd love to spend a few days wandering around after-hours with a lot more photo gear. Their prices seem pretty reasonable, too, especially considering how delicate that environment is, so I may have to look into that.

 

[Dmitri]

Ah cool. I always heard about the carlsbad caverns growing up, but always been too far away to go see them. Nice shots, it must be very claustrophobic in there

 

[KD5NRH]

Ah cool. I always heard about the carlsbad caverns growing up, but always been too far away to go see them. Nice shots, it must be very claustrophobic in there

Nothing on any of the routes we took was even close to problematic, with the possible exception of one crawl on the Lower Cave tour, and there was a bypass for that where folks who didn't want to crawl could walk around it.

There are a few other tours that involve some tight squeezes, but IIRC, Spider Cave is the only tour available to the general public that involves any tight crawls more than a few feet long.

If you're ever in the area, check it out; at $6/person for regular admission on the self-guided routes, it's a lot cheaper than most show caves. Take a tripod, and learn to work quickly, though; they don't have a problem with pods as long as you don't get in anybody's way, but even a small pod will take up the entire paved trail in most places.

I'd wanted to do some long exposure panoramas, but since I had to set up, take the shot, and move out of the way for everybody to go by, lining everything up again for another 8-10sec shot would have been nearly impossible.