Hey Itnetlolor: What program did you get those shots with? The only renderer I know of is the Cartographer, which only makes more airplane-height maps than that.
I rely greatly on natural caves for my excavation, which means my mining missions double as combat patrols, since I always play on normal difficulty. Any time I start down I take at least a full stack of torches, a half-dozen stone picks and a couple iron ones, two swords, several porkchops, and some gravel and wool or dirt for improvising stairs. I pick a branch, and dash madly through it, placing a torch on any wall surface I can reach near the edge of each other torch's light radius. Usually I'm fast enough that I rarely get attacked, unless the system is particularly convoluted and there's a branch I wind up staying near for a long time without lighting.
What I guess makes me different is that I don't make markers, I don't places torches in any particular pattern, I don't use signs or maps. Heck, I even progress up and down by digging stairways into the rock, and I sometimes even go out of my way to make them as minimally-invasive and natural looking as possible. I have a very good sense of visual direction - any path I travel once I can navigate again, and I remember the terrain of the cave itself as a land mark. I can navigate easily through any of the massive cave formations in the map I'm currently in, and even picture in my mind's eye walking through tunnels from maps past.
The only times I get lost is when I can't find the specific set of narrow ledge-jumps or something to get in or out of an area. I recognize everything, I just can't always remember exactly which "areas" are connected to which others. My navigation sense is also entirely visual, not dimensional. Every time I've deliberately tried to intercept one tunnel from another with mining, I fail completely. When I happen to accidentally break into a tunnel I've already explored, it's always cause for confusion and celebration.
Personally, I consider exploring new caves to be the the best part of the game, aside from looking at finished projects. Probably because it's the only major activity in single-player aside from building and walking aimlessly across the world.