The Cayman Islands are on many cruise itineraries. Awhile back, I posted photos from an excursion tour of a labyrinth of caves on Grand Cayman Island. As usual, there is a bus ride to the site of the excursion. Invariably, I find the window by my seat dirty, or the bus is crowded and I don’t get a window seat. Often there isn’t much worth photographing, especially considering the likelihood of reflections through the window glass. I found a trick to get around the reflections. Place the camera lens flat against the window to take your shot. Of course, you can expect some blurry images as vibrations from the vehicle can create motion blur in your entire image. Another source for motion blur is that objects closer to the bus window will be moving relatively faster than objects in the background creating blur in foreground objects only. My antidote for the blurry motion is to select a very fast shutter speed. The opening image, captured as we traveled along a road paralleling the island’s beaches, was captured at 1/8000 sec.

That fast a shutter speed requires a relatively high ISO and larger lens opening. In this case, the meter picked ISO-400 Auto-ISO and F/7.1 for a lens opening. Truthfully, I don’t often share these images because they don’t often turn out for one reason or another. On this excursion, I was lucky to get a window seat on the ocean side of the bus, and the only issue was the morning sun being a bit of a problem.

I almost always bracket my shots taking three images either setting the camera to vary the shutter speed or f-stop depending upon the situation. In this case, I set the camera to shutter priority with 1/8000 sec. to stop motion blur as we traveled down the highway. The camera generates three images when I press the shutter, one with proper exposure, one, an f-stop darker, and one an f-stop brighter. I then use Lightroom to merge the image into an HDR image, the result of merging the images (and with a trip to Luminar for final tweaks,) is shown in the opening image.

When taking the three images from a moving vehicle, each image is a few feet further down the road. Seeing that in Lightroom, I decided instead of creating an HDR image, I thought I’d try a Panorama. I didn’t know what to expect as one of the images in the series is “too dark” and one is “too light.” Just like in the Three Bears story, one image is “just right.” Well, it turns out that Lightroom knows how to match the exposures as it creates a panoramic image. The first picture in the series has a bit of detail that doesn’t exist in the other two photos on the right, and the last image has some detail on the left that doesn’t exist in the other two. The faster the vehicle is moving, the more distance is traveled between each of the three shots.

The image above was the first of these “mini-pano” shots I tried. I was pleasantly surprised that the exposure matched on all three images and even though the tree was in all three images, the software put the tree dead center, blocking the strong sunlight behind it. That worked out pretty well and though it isn’t a “world-class” photo by any means, I was pleased with how it turned out.

Of the three samples where I tried the technique, this one was my least favorite. It had too much road visible, so I cropped the bottom which gave it a more panoramic feel than the other two. Now that I discovered there might be some interesting images in my library of shots from bus windows over the years, I may just have to look specifically for some more photos to process.

My last image demonstrates an aberration that could occur. Those two trees are really one tree. you can tell by the markings on the tree trunk itself. You can see that one view of the tree is “slightly rotated” from the other since each image was captured from a slightly different angle. I had trouble believing it was two copies of the same tree at first because the hedge in the background behind the trees appears to have inconsistent heights indicating that the trees are standing in front of two different size hedges. I can’t explain that anomaly, I just found it interesting.

All in all, this was a fun experiment. I certainly will keep the “mini-pano” in mind for when I again get to travel by bus and see something interesting to try to photograph. Kudos to Adobe for adjusting the exposures on the fly in their Panoramic Merge tool.

John Steiner

About thirty years ago, a young man from Denmark moved to Grand Cayman and followed in his father’s footsteps. Christian Sorensen spent time searching the island for suitable caves to build a tourist attraction in the same manner as his father, Ole Sorensen, who was already successful in the development of Harrison’s Caves in Barbados. Unlike some of the cave attractions in the Caribbean that are complete with pirate “skeletons” and fake treasures, you won’t find any of that in Crystal Caves. From those early explorations, it took Christian Sorensen twenty years to purchase and develop the property into what it is today.

Given that the tallest point on the island is only 79 feet (24 m) above sea level, in a way, it’s surprising that there are caves at all. In the caves that were part of our tour, we didn’t really have the sense of going very far down, though we did walk down a spiral staircase to enter one of the caves, it was only what I would consider a single floor to the cave bottom. Many caves, like in the opening photo can simply be walked into or out of. Many of the caves had openings in the roof that let in sunlight as in the cave above.

Our cruise excursion tour started with a bus ride to the northern end of the island where we entered a rain forest area. Of course, being a rain forest, it started to rain. Our group hunkered under a collection of palapa style tables. Our tour guides had us wait a bit while they discussed a change in the tour based upon not making us walk a long distance in the rain. They took enough time that by the time we were ready to go, the rain had all but stopped. The tour modification was no longer necessary and we would get the “full tour” which meant a little longer walk to the first of several caves we would visit.

The tour guide kept it geologic and educational in nature. There was little mention of the fact that pirates did indeed use caves like this as hideouts. They were also used as shelter from hurricanes that happened to visit the islands over the years. Our tour guide was friendly and knowledgeable, he kept up a running conversation as we journeyed through three caves on our tour. Whether you are visiting the island on a cruise, or are vacationing there, if you are considering a visit to Cayman Crystal Caves, be sure to book your tour before you arrive. They do not sell tickets to “drop-in” visitors.

The darkest areas of the cave tour are well lit and the passages are wide, so you won’t have any feel for true “spelunking” on the tour. Having said that, wear clothing that will support the climate in the rain forest and wear comfortable, fully enclosed shoes. Crystal Caves gets its name because crystals within the formations shine in the bright artificial lighting installed in the caves.

The last cave on our tour is known as Lake Cave. As you enter the cave, you descend into a series of caverns that lead to a larger cavern where an underground lake awaits your cameras. The tour guide spent a lot of time taking photos of tourists at various points on the tour, but nowhere near as many photos as he captured of the guests as they stood in front of this beautifully lighted lake. The lighting system was adjusted to focus on various parts of the cave and lake during this part of the tour. The image captured above provided reflective light that allowed us to view the surface of the cave above the lake by viewing the reflection in the water.

To underscore the fact that this tour is not your typical cave tourist attraction, in 2018, Crystal Caves was awarded one of the Governor’s Conservation Awards to recognize the attraction’s achievement in historic preservation and environmental conservation in the Cayman Islands. For protecting biodiversity, wildlife, endangered species while offering environmentally friendly visitor access to nature, beauty, and outdoor recreation opportunities, Crystal Caves was awarded the Tourism Industry Conservation Award. You can learn more about their tours and make reservations on their website here. I submit for your review a gallery of images captured on our guided tour of the Cayman Crystal Caves.

John Steiner