Picture gallery (titles only)

All these pictures are linked to appropriate pages of the area and cave descriptions, but are also gathered together here for a visual tour of CUCC's caving area.

This page lists the titles and the size of the image (each is included in a small HTML page), with links, but there is also a series of pages with thumbnails of each picture. A list of these pages gives access to each one. Warning: they will take quite a while to load!

Surface - camps and expo activities

Surface - walks and approaches from the road to VSK

Vorderer Schwarzmooskogel southern area caves

Surface - walks and approaches from path 201 to the plateau

Caves on the plateau

Kaninchenhöhle and its approaches

161a entrance

The Right Hand Route

France, Flat France, the new 161d entrance and Triassic Park area

Puerile Humour Series and Iceland

Wheelchair Access to the Lost World

Steinschlagschacht, Forbidden Land and Chile

Steinbrückenhöhle (1623/204)

Note that these are mostly just images, with no HTML page, at present. They are mostly © Erin Lynch.

Other caves on the Schwarzmooskogel ridge, north of VSK and over to HSK

Surface and non-caving activities

About the pictures.

Pictures have made their way to this site in four main ways:

  1. digitised from taped video (Hi8) on a 12-bit digitiser on an Acorn RISC PC
  2. as above but live, with camera looking at an existing photo (or, in a very few cases, looking at the subject)
  3. From 35mm transparency via a Photo-CD
  4. From 1997, digitised from 35mm transparencies or negatives on a Nikon Coolscan II scanner, which gives a lot more control than working from a Photo-CD, as well as a somewhat higher resolution if needed.
  5. From 1999, we have a 600 dpi flatbed scanner, for bigger negatives, or those prints with no negatives available.
  6. A small number of the most recent photographs were taken with a digital camera and thus digitised on the spot.

The video digitiser was an old HCCS H-1000, with software by Pennine Software (a custom version much modified from the release version). Most of the underground pictures (from Photo-CD), and a few of the surface ones, have had quite extensive processing to get detail out of the shadows, and reduce colour bias. Some of this was done with a custom-written program which was very slow indeed, and the results are not ideal. A lot of work has used Acorn's !ChangeFSI, which is particularly good for sharpening and scaling. More recently, David Pilling's ImageMaster software has been used, which is excellent for contrast modification and format conversion. All these run on an Acorn RISC PC. The webmaster now has a Nikon Coolscan transparency and negative scanner (2700 dpi) which runs on a 64Mb PC and is starting to give good results with a lot less post-processing required. Interestingly, results are a lot better from negatives than slides, especially for very high contrast subjects (which includes most underground shots). Expect a load more high-quality photographs to start appearing soon.