While stuck working from home, I'm using various video conferencing apps, mostly Microsoft Teams, but also Zoom, Skype and a few others.

Zoom and Teams have both now enabled a feature to apply a custom background and I thought it might be fun to use a cave image for a background; after all, that's where I'd prefer to be.

My initial specification is:

• well lit cave
• no caver
• no running water or other moving feature
• chamber or passage suitably sized that a webcam image over the top will be roughly the right proportion
• no part of the image too close to the camera

I'll have a dig through my photos tonight to see what I've got that's suitable, but in the meantime, I thought I'd see if anyone else has any more thoughts on a specification, or suitable photos they don't mind sharing.

When you get one, may I please pinch it too?

My club has just had a trial run of jitsi, a new free, open-source piece of video-conferencing software.  (We found we preferred it to Teams, which we also tried.)

The highlight of the try out was the Secretary speaking from the throne room at Buckingham Palace, crystal chandelier and all!

This any use

Regard Gary

It does rely on the age of your operating system...

Why use a genuine photo when you could have a fake?  Everything is fake these days, including Zoom backgrounds.  Fake is the new normal.  Add cavers, remove cavers, move formations between caves, rescale stuff... easy!

I put some fake formation photos on the Chelsea website for a while and nobody even batted an eyelid!

Get a grand piano down a cave?  Not a problem.

So after a little experimentation, I've updated the photo criteria:

• cave (or other interesting place) with similar lighting conditions to where you will be sitting
• landscape orientation
• horizontal camera angle
• camera height relative to surroundings approximately the same as webcam height
• no caver/ people in picture
• no running water or other moving feature
• chamber, passage or surroundings suitably proportioned that a webcam image over the top will be the right size
• no part of the image too close to the camera
• no bright/ point back-light

...and it has to be said that I'm finding it really hard to find many pictures that meet most/ all of these! The hardest thing is pictures without people or moving water, but with either of these, the effect is entirely unconvincing. :-\

Below are three experiments. The first is Porth y Ogof, just inside the entrance and I think this works quite well. The second is in one of my old digs, the passage is actually much smaller than it appears, but the effect seems ok. The third is an old mine in the Weardale, it looks ok on a still, but the bright pin-head of light behind looks very false once in video (hence last bullet point above).

I've put the originals of these on Flickr, along with some others that I thought might work (mostly mines as they seem to match my criteria better), but I wasn't very happy with any of the others, but feel free to experiment with any of them if you want.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/145251315@N06/?

And obviously feel free to share your own 

Sit in front of the light - the fun thing is when your head disappears behind the pic!