News: Toni Lamprecht and Yes we can't

This just in: Seems Toni Lamprecht made himself a nice christmas present and made a toprope ascent of his project Yes we can't at Afrikawand in Kochel, Germany. It's an awesome route on a seemingly blank wall filled with micro edges, crimps and a beautiful mono... the Antonator has been obsessing over it throughout the fall until now and I'm so happy for him that he finally made it! (Last I heard from him, he was unsure if the route could responsibly be redpointed, but knowing the route, a linked toprope ascent is pretty damn impressive!)

Congrats to Tonelli, make sure to check out his own new blog (!). Seems technology can't be stopped, in December he finally got his first cellphone and now he already has a blog ;-)

Happy holidays,
cheers
Bruno

Happy holidays!

Hi everybody

Let me just drop in this quick post in order to wish you all a Merry Christmas! I hope all of you have a great time and make it safe and sound over the holidays. Sorry about the late christmas wishes, but christmas eve is traditionally hectic with my family, and I just didn't make it earlier. Right now I'm sitting in front of my new laptop, financed in part by my awesome family, trying to get a grip on all the new stuff. Glad to see internet access is working fine, so I hope I'll be up and running with the essential stuff by tomorrow afternoon...

But enough about me. This post is, after all, especially about all of you! I just want to take this opportunity to extend a big big thank you to everyone who has visited and (hopefully) keeps visiting my blog! It's been great fun this past year and I'm already looking forward to the next. I hope I've managed to help you in some little way or at least made your stay worth your time. I'm always open for feedback, be it positive or negative, so feel free to drop me a line by email or in the comments below.

A merry christmas to all of you, see you soon!

Peace!
Bruno

Christmas presents, projects and stills

Hi everyone!

It's been quite a while since the last post but, apart from me being a bit short on time lately, I just don't believe in talking / writing when you've got nothing to say...

I managed to spent some quality time in Kochel working on the project and I'm starting to feel confident that I might do it sometime in the nearer future. The crux is becoming more and more secure and I also found a solution to the top part which puzzled me before. (Shot below (c) by Stephan Winter)



In the photography department, I treated myself to a lovely new "toy"... a Lensbaby! Photographer Udo Neumann wrote about these lenses a while back and encouraged me to try them out. (Thanks for the help Udini!)

Many of you will know what a lensbaby is, but for those of you who don't know, I'll give you a quick rundown on it:

Lensbabies are relatively inexpensive prime lenses that are available for most SLR brands. The unique aspect is the way they focus. Lensbabies are "selective focus lenses" which give you a circular focus spot surround by gradually increasing blur. By twisting the lens body you can shift this circular focus freely around the frame. This is really great for highlighting specific parts of your frame and directing the viewer's eye towards them. Sounds fun? You have no idea! It is an awesome experience and I had a blast simply strolling through our neighborhood and taking pictures of fallen leaves and sunlit trees... (something I haven't done since starting out with photography)



Using the lensbaby is a little tricky at first. It's a manual focus lens and you have to set the correct exposure manually as well. Especially focussing can be tough at first. You focus by compressing the lensbaby and holding it in the desired place while taking the shot. Here's a nice video of Craig Strong, the inventor of the Lensbaby, showing you how to use it. (It looks complicated as hell, but trust me, after a few days this will become second nature!)

Aperture is set by dropping different sized rings into the lens' body. The rings attach themselves to the lens through a magnet and the lensbaby comes with a little pen to pull the ring out again. (You can watch all this in the video above) Doing this for the first time is absolutely hilarious and makes you look at the concept of apertures with a completely new set of eyes.

Thinking about Christmas, this lens just might be the perfect present for anyone interested in photography. For the experienced shooter, it might give a spark of inspiration to your work and offer a whole new view on your subjects. (One of the lensbaby models isn't called Muse for nothing!) For the beginner, the lensbaby is perfect for understanding the basic principles of photography. Don't understand what aperture means? Play around with a lensbaby for 5 minutes and you'll figure it out all by yourself!

So if you've got a relative / friend who's interested in photography, this lens might just be the perfect present!



Have a good one, see you soon!
Bruno

Urban Crack Climbing - Roof project

above: Phil free aiding the crack, spotted by Daxi

Near the crack we worked on earlier this year, my friend Daxi discovered a small tunnel with a 6m/18feet horizontal roof crack that just might be the right size to free-climb. So Daxi, Phil and I met there yesterday evening to check out if it might be climbable.


above: me doing the first figure-of-four move in my life that actually helped...

The first attempt proved to be a little disappointing as the crack is not wide enough to jam your hand into but also not tight enough to lock your fingers. After a couple of tries and several layers of tape we managed to lift off at least, but moving your hands still seemed impossible. You have to stuff your palm all the way into the crack and then push with your fingers to the sides in order to jam between your fingertips and backs of your hand. The problem is moving one of your hands for the next jam, which so far has proved too hard.



Anyway, we went on to invent a whole new style of bouldering: free aid bouldering... Instead of jamming your hands into the crack, you use a camalot for each hand and hold onto that. Of course, moving the gear is still the hard part as you either have to do a one arm pull-up or a figure-of-four for each placement. I was totally psyched to have come up with the figure of four beta but it's still quite intimidating as you have to trust the placement of your gear completely.



Plunging back first with your arms and legs interlocked onto the crashpad 8 feet below didn't seem all that appealing... Phil gave it a go and made it halfway through the crack before he was too pumped to go on. A rest and two tries later he made the first free aid ascent of this crack. Pretty impressive!



For the shots, I set ISO at 800 in order to collect more light in a shorter shutter-speed and put my SB-600 flash on the ground to my left or right. Flash was set to rear-curtain sync as always and fired at 1/20th power. Shutterspeeds were around 1/10th of a second.



Driving home, I was still dreaming about doing a real free ascent of this crack, but it will definitely be very very hard... probably way to hard for me, but it's nice to have a project right in your home town which will be snow-free and dry throughout the winter months. We'll be back for sure, I just hope it's possible.

Jenseits von Jena, Oct 29th

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After the bad light/weather in Kochel last week we ran into some serious good weather/light yesterday. The trees were ablaze with autumn leaves and the sky was clear pretty much all day. I managed to get my pal Duy psyched about my current boulder project and we spent all day working on it.


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I'd visited the project on my own a couple of times in the last few weeks but I just couldn't push myself that hard without somebody else around to share this obsession... finally made some real progress on it, too. I managed to stick the crux move for the first time ever and also figured it out in a way that I can do it about 65% of the tries, which goes a long way for making the whole problem seem more realistic. Unfortunately I always fell on the follow-up move because my foot kept slipping off the hold but I was totally satisfied nonetheless. Anyway, pretty psyched, starting to think it just might be possible for me to climb this thing after all...


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I played around with my 50mm 1.8 lens together with my SB-600 flash fired off-camera. The 50mm 1.8 always amazes me. At $150 it's one of the cheapest Nikon lenses you can buy and it is really awesome in terms of image quality. Unfortunately, the 50mm (which is on film and full frame cameras a very versatile focal length) becomes quite tight on DX crop sensors like my D90's... (about 75mm-80mm on full frame/35mm film) For climbing and bouldering this makes it difficult to use as you often can't stand back far enough. If it works, though, it works very very well. At f4 and up, images become sharper than anything possible on a zoom lens and colours are captured much much better.

The images in this post were all shot in manual mode which made it easier for me to balance between flash and natural light. I controlled the SB-600 via the D90's pop-up flash and put it down on the ground angling upwards. Flash output was set around quarter power in manual mode. I would have preferred a slightly bigger aperture (less depth of field) but due to bright conditions and the D90's maximum shutter speed with flash being 1/200th of a second, I had to go with apertures between f9 to f11.

(The full exif data on these images can be found at my flickr page, just click on any of the images and select Additional information.)


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Have a great weekend,
cheers
Bruno

Five for Friday - Vol 04

#1 Guy called Marshall doing Narcotic 8a+/8b in Fontainebleau. Beautifully filmed, cool problem!

#2 Dave Graham fooling around at home... hilarious!

#3 Joe McNally - The Swap

#4 Joe McNally again - Changing light bulb at the Empire State Building, cool video, nice music

#5 Cedar Wright's blog, very very nice videos, including one clip on Tommy Caldwell's training regime!

Dealing with bad light

Toni Lamprecht in one of his current projects
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We had a fantastic day of climbing in Kochel last friday. Toni worked on a new project and I had the chance to jumar along to take pictures. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't great and light was absolutely terrible. Still, I wanted to get a couple of nice shots, so I kept playing with my camera's settings trying to get a grip on the situation.



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Note: I'm not a wizard at this. In this post I try to explain the things I figured out while shooting/jumaring and looking at the results afterwards, so everything you read here should be taken with a little caution. I'd love to hear your suggestions, so please feel free to write me via email or in the comments, especially if you've got ideas how I could have improved things!

Hanging from a fixed rope I didn't have a free hand to work an off-camera flash, so I was stuck with either blasting away with on-camera flash or with shooting high ISOs around 3,200. While the D90 is pretty good at working high ISOs (even 3,200 is still usable) the images still suffer much because colours and contrasts become so crappy in bad light such as this. (Have a look at the image on the left; Note: I accidentally poured too much noise reduction into it during post-processing, the D90 actually handles noise better than this, I was just too lazy to reprocess the shot)

The other option, on-camera flash, isn't great either. Letting the camera take control, you get a subject blasted in white, harsh light with everything else turning into total blackness. Nice if you're doing a portrait session at the Draculas', but not that great for making vibrant images of climbing on God's green earth...

The shot to the right is what you get if you leave dealing with bad light to the camera...

But if you have to use on-camera flash, there are a still few things you can do do make it look better than what your camera's auto settings will deliver.

Set your camera-flash sync to rear curtain sync

This way your camera first gathers some of the ambient light (how much it gathers depends on the shutter speed you choose) before freezing your subject with your flash as it fires at the end of the exposure. I prefer to shoot in Shutter priority mode for this, meaning I set the shutter speed as fast or slow as I want and let the camera choose a fitting aperture. (I don't often go into full manual mode because when I'm hanging from a rope and things are moving fast I like to leave as much work to the camera as possible) You can also shoot in program automatic mode, but in dark conditions the camera often chooses crazy long exposures up to a couple of seconds. This is because the camera tries to fully expose the image with the ambient light instead of just gathering a little bit.
Choosing the correct shutterspeed is always a trade off. The slower the shutter speed, the more (good) ambient light will be gathered and your flash will have to blast less (bad) artificial light into the image. The downside is that with longer shutterspeeds anything that moves will be increasingly blurry and it often comes down to luck whether the image is still usable or not. (It looks good when a moving hand is blurred but the climber's face usually should be sharp) I like to use 1/30th as a starting point and go from there. At 1/30th your chances of getting sharp images with a little but not too much blur are pretty good and it is long enough to allow some ambient light to seep in. (The images above were shot at 1/20th in order to collect more ambient light)

More on rear-curtain sync can be found here

One way to gather more light at the same shutterspeed is to boost your ISO. If you're working with auto ISO (which I do quite often) while using flash, the camera prefers to increase flash power instead of boosting ISO. (That's the case with the Nikon D90, your camera or brand might be different) If your camera does that, you might want to set your ISO to manual and choose a higher value, something between 400 and 800 might be fine. I have to admit I forgot to do that with these shots. I guess I should have boosted the ISO (auto ISO chose 320) instead of lowering the shutterspeed down to 1/20th. Lucked out, though, so no harm done...

In the end, it is all about balancing the different light sources. Especially when using "ugly" flashed light (meaning on-camera) you'll probably want to balance it with the ambient light in such a way that you don't really notice the flash. It's like adding make-up. Improve the look but make it look as if you hadn't.

Again, I'm not a wizard at this. As I said before, I'm still fairly inexperienced and almost every day I learn something new about taking better images. Look at this as an attempt to make my own learning progress as transparent as possible by laying open my own "source code". I hope you find something worth your while here!

Cheers
Bruno