Carlsbad Caverns

As you pass through the Chihuahuan Desert and Guadalupe Mountains of southeastern New Mexico and west Texas—filled with prickly pear, chollas, sotols and agaves—you might never guess there are more than 300 known caves beneath the surface. The park contains 113 of these caves, formed when sulfuric acid dissolved the surrounding limestone, creating some of the largest caves in North America. Most of the formations—or speleothems—found inside Carlsbad Cavern today were active and growing during the last ice age when instead of having a desert above the cave, there were pine forests.

All visitors to the park should tour the main section of the cave, the Big Room self-guided tour. The 8.2-acre Big Room is partially wheelchair accessible. The Natural Entrance self-guided tour is also very impressive, but it is also more difficult due to the steepness of the trail.

Carlsbad Cavern is one of over 300 limestone caves in a fossil reef laid down by an inland sea 250 to 280 million years ago. Twelve to fourteen thousand years ago, American Indians lived in the Guadalupe Mountains; some of their cooking ring sites and pictographs have been found within the present day boundaries of the park. By the 1500s, Spanish explorers were passing through present-day west Texas and southeastern New Mexico. Spain claimed the southwest until 1821 when Mexico revolted against her and claimed independence. Mexico, fighting the westward expansionist United States in the late 1840s, lost the southwest to the US. In 1850, New Mexico Territory was created, and for the next 30 years the cultural conflict between American Indians and the US government continued. Eddy, New Mexico, the future Carlsbad, was established in 1888 and New Mexico became a state in 1912.

The sense of scale and magnitude, the overwhelming feeling of being a very small object occupying an immense space, of being dwarfed by the objects in the cave as well as the cave itself isn't captured to any degree of satisfaction when taking photos of objects within the cavern using a camera having a focal length setting that provides merely a 1-1 view. This is a common scenario when implementing a focal length setting of around 55mm, as when using a simple fixed focal length box camera. After the first few photos were taken using my Nikon 18-70mm F/3.5-4.5 G lens, I decided to use my Nikon 10.5mm F/2.8 G Fisheye Lens instead in an attempt to capture as much imagery as possible in a single picture. Many of the photos in this presentation were taken using this fisheye lens. This lens, providing a 180 degree field of view in a single picture, produces highly distorted images as a result. Using special software, it is possible to remove most of the distortions with the exception of those near the outside edges of the corners. What you see in these photos linearly from left to right is as it would be if you turned your head from left to right covering a 180 degree viewing range. As I mentioned, you will notice some distortion in some of the photos, the magnitude of which in part depends largely upon the closeness of the objects being photographed.

Available cave lighting also presented a problem. The cave lighting is subdued, with sparsely placed lights strategically hidden and located to illuminate only featured speleothems. The absence of lighting suitable for photographic purposes presents a problem for photographers in that you would have to open the camera's aperture to a great extent and shoot with a slow shutter speed to get proper exposures. Depth of field and blurry pictures may be the result of this combination. One could bring along a good tripod to help solve this problem, but it is just another item to tote around the cave. I used a Nikon SP-800 flash attachment to enhance the available lighting for each photo. This flash attachment throws out a lot of light, thus solving this problem to a large extent. This added lighting also revealed object's colors that you may not see with the naked eye while touring the cavern. Video photography is likewise challenged. I took about one hour's worth of video using both available lighting (I didn't bring a video camera light with me) and the camera's built-in Infrared capabilities. Neither would bring out the true colors of the objects being videotaped using available lighting. As the camera's light amplification was operating at full strength, lots of electronic "noise" was present along with the images. Infrared video results in grainy, green-tinted images, and if one panned too quickly, the images would go out of focus. 

For additional and more complete information regarding Carlsbad Caverns, visit the National Park Services Carlsbad Caverns page at:

http://www.nps.gov/cave/index.htm

This presentation requires the Adobe Flash Player version 8.0 or above to be installed with your browser. Most will have this browser plug-in already installed...knowingly or not. If you find you don't have this plug-in installed, you can get it (free) at:

http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash

When you are ready to view the presentation, click on the "Go To Presentation" button below. Note: It will take a short period of time for the presentation to download. Once downloaded, you will find image control buttons at the bottom of the display which will allow you to either advance to the next photo, or go back to the previous one. Also note, the images are sized in proportion to the size of your browser window. To see a larger presentation of an image, resize your browser window to be a larger size. These images are compressed down from their original 3008x2000 pixels to much less than that to facilitate faster downloads and the average viewing screen. This has resulted in some picture detail being lost. If you would like to have a full-sized copy of any of these photos let me know. They're roughly 5MB each in terms of file size. Contact me at: glsmith@hlswilliwaw.com.