Bruno Axhausen - Climbing Photography

New Post at new Blog

2010-09-10T10:15:00.003+02:00

Hi everybody,

as you probably know, I moved my blog over to my current site at

www.brunoaxhausen.com/blog

For those of you who still check here for updates, I just posted a new blog post there

I'd love to see you there!

Cheers

Bruno

New website

2010-04-06T17:42:00.003+02:00

New, new, all new...

As mentioned before, I've been spending a lot of time building my website. If you haven't already stumbled upon it, the site is finally live and located at http://www.brunoaxhausen.com

Feedback is always welcome, so feel free to drop me a line in the comments or via email!

My blog will also live there from now on and I'd love to welcome you there! I haven't yet gotten around to formatting every old post, so some posts might not display correctly. I hope everything is legible -if it's not, please drop me a line- and I'll try to edit the old posts as soon as possible.

New blog posts will be published at the new adress. But don't worry, in order to make the change as easy as possible, I'll keep posting notices for new blog posts on this blog as well, so I hope you will all find your way to the new site!

More to come,

all the best,

Bruno

News 15/03/10

2010-03-15T10:02:00.009+01:00

Whoof. Time's been flying. For the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a wide variety of things, from building my website to finally putting together a decent printed portfolio. I'm especially excited about the portfolio, it's been in the works for quite some time now and I'm about to finally finish it. (As much as you ever can "finish" a portfolio...)

My website is also coming along, although -as I haven't really done any webdesign before- it's taking a little more time than I had anticipated... I'll post here when it's officially going life, stay tuned!

On the climbing front, things have been going pretty slow and I haven't touched real rock in weeks... I hope I'll manage to get some work done in my project soon, a little afraid how bad I'll do.

That's it for now, more stuff coming soon!
All the best, Bruno

Report: Industrial Climbing

2010-02-15T08:20:00.009+01:00

I've always been fascinated by good craftsmanship. It doesn't really matter to me whether the work is a painting or a wooden chair or a musical instrument. Malicious tongues may claim that this is because I'm a lazy bastard who prefers watching other people do the actual work.This may partially be true, but in truth I simply enjoy the company of people who are passionate about their work. Recently I had the chance to follow my friend H.G. as he replaced a couple of huge advertising banners high above Munich. A demanding job for two to three guys, H.G. does it regularly on his own each month.

A job like this requires keeping track of multiple ropes, biners and knots, each one crucial for a) keeping the whole rig from turning into one huge ball that will keep you occupied for a week in order to unravel again and b) keeping you from getting killed. Like many jobs that involve heights, big machines or aggressive animals, it's tough to find the right balance between doing your job efficiently and always keeping in mind that fucking up can mean that you hurt yourself. Although the risks are all controllable, stupid mistakes or a moment's inattention can have pretty drastic consequences.

Weather was windy, crisp and clear, which meant great conditions for me but rather unattractive conditions for the one doing the actual work. Later, the sun was coming out and the snow on the roof started melting, dripping down on us as HG was struggling to undo dozens of frozen knots with numb and hurting hands.

It turned out to be a long day, and although I wasn't the one doing the actual work, I was dead tired when we finally wrapped up.

TECH STUFF

Most of the above shots were taken in manual mode with my SB-600 firing off camera via the D90's pop-up flash commander. I was lucky that the building had a huge row of windows just above the top of the banner, so I could shoot from these most of the time. Much easier than I had anticipated and also much less hassle for HG.

One very important piece of advice: Anytime when heights are involved you have to ensure that you and your gear can't take a dive! Always make sure that you have some sort of safety measure in place, even in places that might seem relatively safe. I spent most of the day leaning out of windows and even then I made sure to attach myself to some sort of anchor in case I slipped. Sure, it was annoying dragging a rope around all day. But when you're all hot for the perfect shot and you're leaning out of that window to get the right angle, bad things can happen pretty fast. An icicle may hit you on the head or someone who doesn't pay attention might knock into you. It's not worth it. Make sure you're safe all the time!

And always keep your gear secure as well! Besides the fact that it can cost you a lot of money if your precious camera with lens

and flash decides to hug the pavement, you can -plain and simple- kill someone with that stuff! I know all the additional straps and ropes are a nuisance but it's a small price to pay in order to keep the people around you safe!
I usually like to secure the flash to the camera while the camera's neck strap is rigged to my climbing harness. I don't carry the camera around my neck as I find it restricts movement too much. While rigging it to your harness does prevent the camera from falling on someone's head, it doesn't keep it from swinging into the wall below you and damaging the lens. Carrying the camera around your neck would be the safest way, but I prefer freedom of movement to the safety of my equipment. (Dropping your gear is, after all, still unlikely)

One more piece of advice: When shooting all day, make sure to stay fed and try to rest anytime you can. Pressing a button all day might not seem like the most strenuous of activities, but it does wear you out. Having a couple of candy bars in your camera bag pays dividends when you've been running around all day and never found the time to eat something. People worry endlessly about better image quality when buying new cameras, but a fed, warm and rested photographer is the key to good image quality. If you are hungry, wet and tired, you start to be indifferent about your subject. You opt to wait inside when your subject heads out onto the roof "just to check something". You start loading your camera gear into your car before the subject has left the scene. You are too lazy to jumar another ten feet just to try yet another angle. Treat your body well and your images will thank you!

Toni Lamprecht Portrait Series

2010-02-04T07:08:00.006+01:00

Had breakfast at the Antonator's yesterday. After his bouldering injury he's on sick leave for a couple of weeks and working full time on the upcoming Kochel guide and other projects. Our little breakfast turned into a long and relaxed discussion about everything from climbing to photography and music. Had loads of fun. Toni was easygoing as always and didn't even mind me doing a quick portrait session while we talked. Thanks man!

Images: Nothing complicated, my trusted SB-600 shooting into a silver coated umbrella to camera left angled slightly down and about 4 feet / 1.5 metres away from Toni. Used my 50mm 1.8, shooting 100th at f.5, ISO 350.

Impromptu Portrait Sesssion

2010-01-22T09:09:00.007+01:00

Finally managed to produce some new content of my own! Met with my friend Daxi last week to check out a few new buildering possibilities he'd discovered in Munich. He showed me a load of different projects, ranging from totally relaxed bouldering to get-arrested-and-spend-the-night-in-jail kind of stuff...totally amazing this guy!

After this, I asked him if he'd be up for some monkeying around in front of the camera and he kindly agreed. Had loads of fun, Daxi is simply one of the best people to shoot on this earth.

Tech-Info:
Shot on manual, 200th at f8, ISO 100, flash off-camera (hand-held) manual at 16% power. Nothing fancy, simply worked out a slightly dark exposure for the background and then added flash power to bring the foreground up a step or two above background level.

Big Picture: How to live before you die

2010-01-16T21:51:00.008+01:00

Stumbled upon this a few weeks ago. Got me thinking, maybe it gets you thinking, too. Click here for the iTunes link. Here's the beginning:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories...

Read the rest here.

Composition & The Photographer's Eye

2010-01-05T17:22:00.048+01:00

One of the standard pieces of advice beginning photographers keep hearing is that it's not about the camera, it's about your ability to see. Sure, that's true. But it's also not really helpful. It's really an "enough but not too much" kind of advice. Sounds great, but the listener is still on his own in getting it right.

And exactly that's the problem. Many people think they don't have the eye for photography. They think this eye is something you'd have to have been given at birth. Mr Freeman's book "The Photographer's Eye" goes a long way in showing us that the ability to see is a skill that can be learned just like you learn how to operate your camera or ride a bike. There's no magic involved. Being able to see is about knowing and being able to recognize patterns or schemas that work in an image. Just like with poems or songs, humans are looking at images in a certain way. Compositional ideas like the rule of thirds are universal and work in the same way for every shot. It's a simple fact that -for example- our eyes prefer to scan an image from down to up and left to right. It's just the way the human eye works. Knowing exactly how we see is the key to strong images.

In his book "The Photographer's Eye", Mr Freeman focusses completely on composition in photography and if I can say one thing about it, it is that I was a much better photographer already after only browsing through this book for the first time in the store. Once you know a litte bit about the way our eyes and minds work, you'll start recognizing these patterns everywhere around you. A telephone booth will not only be a telephone booth but a possible colour contrast with the brick wall behind it. A fence in the background can be used to lead the viewer's eye towards your subject or left out of the frame in order to keep the viewer's eye from being directed out of the image. You will know instinctively how to frame your image in order to achieve the desired effect.

That doesn't mean that you neccessarily have to deliver what the viewer's eye expects or feels the most comfortable with. You might decide that, for this specific shot, a slightly uncomfortable or unconventional composition is better than a pleasing one. No one says you can't or shouldn't. But you can't make this decision if you don't know which is which. You have to know the rules to break them. And, more importantly, you have to know the consequences of either sticking to them or breaking them. In the end, composition is composing the message you want to send. Having a message is the first step. (If you don't have a message you might want to consider taking the camera away from your eyes until you have one.) Translating that message into an image is the second step. And that's what composition is all about. Take the usual holiday shot as an example. A tight crop of husband & wife says "that's us, where we are isn't important". The same couple, a wider lens and palm trees behind them says "that's us on vacation". Use a slightly wider lens still, catch that oil-rig/construction site/nuclear power plant in the background and the image says "that's us on vacation after being screwed by our travel agency". It's all in the way you frame your shot. That's composition.

Some people may get this right instinctively. My lovely girlfriend Annie doesn't care in the slightest about photographic theory yet her shots are composed perfectly nonetheless. Most people (me included) don't have this gift. We have to learn it. Is that a problem? Absolutely not. Composition is a skill. It can be learned. In his introduction, Mr Freeman quotes artist Johannes Itten: If you, unknowing, are able to create masterpieces in color, then unknowledge is your way. But if you are unable to create masterpieces in color out of your unknowledge, then you ought to look for knowledge. So, if composition comes to you instinctively, great! But if you're looking for knowledge, "The Photographer's Eye" might be the best place to start.

Links:

Mr Freeman's site
Get the book at Amazon US or UK

For more information on the art of composition also check out Ken Rockwell's post here.

For the german readers: Das Buch gibt es bei Amazon.de sowohl in der Originalausgabe als auch in deutscher Übersetzung unter dem Namen "Der Fotografische Blick". Leider ist die deutsche Übersetzung nicht besonders gut gelungen, wer über ausreichende Englischkenntnisse verfügt greift besser zur Originalausgabe. (Die englische Ausgabe ist zur Zeit übrigens um 10€ günstiger als die deutsche!) Dramatisch sind die Übersetzungsfehler allerdings nicht, hin und wieder liest es sich aber ein wenig holprig.

Summing Up

2009-12-31T11:23:00.011+01:00

I'm not a big fan of all the end of the year nostalgia, but while browsing through 2009's archives I decided to try and pick my ten favorite shots that I took this year. Here are my picks, feel free to disagree:

Yes that's me. Completely lucked out with the self-timer there and I don't think I would have made anything different had I been behind the camera to press the shutter. Made plenty more images on that day, none came close. Don't know what I did to deserve that much blind luck, probably don't…

My friend Daxi under the bridge… Had a fantastic day with perfect crisp weather and Nikon's TTL system working perfectly. Who says on-camera flash has to look crappy? Shot a sequence, flash misfired on nearly every shot but this one… lucky once again.

One of the many portrait shots I did of Toni Lamprecht. Toni's face is a photog's dream and off-camera flash exposure worked out quite well in the dark forest.

Hurry up! That's all I thought, kneeling in the snow, seeing the sun drop behind the ridge and my pal still waiting at the top for I-don't-know-what. Last (skiing) shot of the day, two minutes later the sun was gone.

Again one of Toni's hardest. Shot some 100 images before I finally figured out how to get a decent balanced exposure in that truly awful light. Saved by Toni's massive shoulders and that beautiful mono looming above him…

Daxi, again under the bridge. One of my first tries with off-camera flash and my new 50mm prime lens…

One of the images that I managed to get published in 2009. Off-camera flash and loads of luck, holding the camera above my head and hoping for the best.

Once again a mixture of adequate off-camera flash exposure and luck. There are climbers that always seem to carry great expressions and others that come across a tad mentally challenged. That's the reason why I usually find myself behind the camera and why Duy is a fantastic subject…

I'm always happy if an image is a little different than others that are taken in the same situation. If it's me who takes that image I'm all the more happy… I loved the shadows the cordon throws in the background and the little yellow leaf was a nice -albeit unplanned- touch. Seems no one really cares about that image but me, but that's ok… I wouldn't be much of an artist if other people understood my work while I'm still alive. (kidding, of course)

Munich's Eisbach is a perfect spot, not only for surfers. Every sunny day, the spot is crowded with people carrying cameras, from the little point&shoot of the tourist to the D3x & 70-200mm 2.8 of the amateur photog with nothing to do. Seriously, this place is fantastic for trying out ideas, getting practice at shooting fast subjects and all that without facing any real pressure other than trying to catch "the perfect shot".
My take on this surf spot in the centre of Munich is a little different than the other images I've seen. For me, all those guys really dream of surfing in California and Hawaii, so I tried to make these images look a little more like a dream place and not like a little river in a crowded city.

These are my picks, I'd love to hear your thoughts! Anyway, I wish you all the best in 2010, hope to see you again here at my blog. Right now I've got my head full of ideas and plans for the next year, hope I'll be able to actually implement some of them.
Thank you all for your support, I appreciate it!

All the best,
Bruno

News: Toni Lamprecht and Yes we can't

2009-12-25T08:43:00.007+01:00

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!

2009-12-23T18:16:00.007+01:00

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

2009-12-08T15:08:00.019+01:00

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

2009-11-04T09:29:00.023+01:00

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

2009-10-30T11:56:00.001+01:00

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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

2009-10-30T07:34:00.000+01:00

#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

2009-10-24T21:05:00.054+02:00

Toni Lamprecht in one of his current projects
Click here for larger size

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.

Click here for larger size

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

Five for Friday - Vol 03

2009-10-14T09:17:00.009+02:00

#1 BigUp's amazing new climbing movie, Progression, now available to buy on DVD or as download. Haven't seen it yet, but the trailer does look awesome!

#2 Chase Jarvis about using off-camera flash in a subtle way. Dramatic lighting is pretty easy, making artificial light look natural may often seem much trickier. Check out his thoughts here.

#3 Dai Koyamada doing Action Directe. I just love this video, it's my favourite about this route.

#4 My pal Tammo Vahlenkamp's website. Great photographer, I love his style. Check him out.

#5 Dean Potter soloing El Capitan...

Interview: Toni Lamprecht

2009-10-14T08:33:00.002+02:00

Toni Lamprecht doesn't really need an introduction. 9a routes, 8c+ boulders, hundreds of first ascents, expeditions to Greenland, Madagascar and others, lead singer in the punk band Analstahl, and all that while teaching handicapped children at a school in Munich, Germany... Once you get to know him, though, you realize that Toni truly isn't concerned about the numbers. He's simply obsessed with climbing. I know many people (including probably me) who are eating, drinking and breathing climbing, but Toni is on another level. In one of Udo Neumann's climbing videos, Udo talks about the fact that he never managed to get home from a bouldering trip with Toni before it was absolutely pitch black dark outside. I quickly learned how accurate this statement was. Even if Toni says he's finished, just before you're about to go home, he will say something like: "Ah, I think I'll just try the bottom part again...", switch on the headlamps and go to work again.

While driving to Kochel two weeks ago, Toni and I talked about his views on climbing photography for a while. Thinking about that I called him up later and he kindly agreed to do a quick interview on this for the blog.

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What makes a great climbing photographer for you?

In my opinion it has to be someone who is in love with this sport to fully understand what is going on. The pictures might be not as good as from a professional sport photographer, but the spirit behind it should be more clear than. And more authentical.

Do you have any favourite climbing photographs of yourself or others?

Not really. It totally depends on the picture itself and the mood I'm in. On the emotional background. And it is kind of boring to watch yourself. Maybe I'm not narcissistic enough. When I was young I had a lot of favourite images, especially from Wolfgang Güllich and Jerry Moffat!

With hundreds of cool images published of yourself, are you still excited about seeing yourself in yet another photograph?

I don't get excited by looking at me than rather looking at a nice image, doesn't matter who the climber is. It doesn't really matter to me, to be published for any kind of satisfaction. I just climb! It is more important that any news plus the picture is inspiring to others. And of course it is important for the brands, that I'm working with.

Personal question: I noticed you don't have any climbing images hanging on your walls at home. Why is that?

Don't know. Maybe because we're living in a roof-flat with basically not a lot of space for a lot of pictures anyway. And my wife is a painter and I prefer to look at her paintings. I looked a lot of years on climbing pictures at my parents place so I might be kind of overdosed with this. I love surfing pictures though.

What do you miss in most climbing shots? Is there something you would like to be done differently?

As long as the shots are authentical I like them. I don't like posed ones with unnatural colours and clean trousers etc.. When climbing outside is dirty and steamy, so the pictures should be like that, too.

You've been involved in the climbing business for most of your life. Do you feel climbing photography has changed during that time?

Nowadays everyone is capable of doing thousands of shots during a session due to the digital progressions. It definitly makes it easier to have a good result for sure. But to have a very good result it will be still the same than 20 years ago. There are more good photograhers out there, but more bad ones, too.

You have worked with a lot of photographers during your climbing career. Which of them have impressed you the most? Why?
The ones that just came climbing with us and shot some cool images to make a documentation. I always felt kind of unsatisfied just to do a model-job in a hard route without having a relation to the person behind the camera.

There are many different possible ways to shoot climbing. Some pros fly out to a climber's project, take a load of shots and get on to other assignments. Other shooters spend more time with the climbers and document the whole athmosphere of the trip. Finally there are amateur shooters like me that just take a camera along while also climbing for themselves. Is there a situation you prefer?

I prefer the last ones, because I'm not a real professional climber anyway! Going out to have fun is the more important thing than to have some nice pictures published after a strange session. The atmosphere is the key to have a good product. At least for me!

What do professional photographers do differently in terms of work ethics, planning and approach as opposed to amateur shooters like me?

Professionals shoot to sell, so the shooting is professional as well (strict timetable, stickers for the sponsors ...)

As you are sponsored by several companies, do you have to make to sure to represent them by wearing their clothes, caps etc. in photos? Do you have to make sure that all your sponsors are featured in every shot or don't they care that much? (If you wear a prana base cap, do you have to wear an Arc'teryx shirt?!)

Of course I have to represent the companies, because it is kind of a fair exchange for the support they give me. And it seems that they are still very happy with me and the way I handle it. I mean: I'm not a slave, not a walking "Litfasssäule" (advertising pillar), which is important for me. I climb, they support me and I publish articles and represent their products in an ex aequo way.

What can you do as a climber to help the photographer in making a great image?

Tell him where to rappel to have a good angle, light ... To explain him the moves. Look to the camera direction!

As a photographer, what mistakes can I make to really bother you or make you upset?

Insist on doing ugly moves more than once for a shooting. But you're lucky, because there won't be any ugly moves in the routes that I climb, because otherwise I wouldn't climb them anyway.

Do you think about the clothes (colours, style etc.) you want to wear when a photographer is scheduled to make pictures of you?

Not really. But sometimes I ask them. But I don't want to climb as a colour-"Kasperl". I prefer to climb in the clothes I like and I prefer to be shot that way.

Your facial expressions are always very intense and dramatic. Is there a little acting involved sometimes or does this come natural?

Natural born poser I guess...

One thing I love about taking images of you is that you seem to be able to ignore my presence as a photographer. Is that something you do consciously?
No. And that is very important for me. If I have to act I feel unhappy. I'm basically a climber not an actor. To react natural even while being shot (with the camera) is important - as long as the photographer is happy, too! Than the team work doubles up to have a good result I think!!!

Thank you for taking part in this!

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Big Picture: Make Do

2009-10-12T10:18:00.028+02:00

When I'm out shooting, 9 out of 10 times I feel like I miss a critical factor to make the winning image. I might wish for another lens, more beautiful light or a third hand. In any case, I always seem to want something that I just can't get for this particular shoot. Shooting climbers in Kochel, I think how cool it would be to have El Capitan as a backdrop, granite instead of limestone and warm early morning light instead of the pitch black darkness that's normal on our winter bouldering sessions. Guess what? It's not going to happen.

So there's two things you can do. You can travel to Yosemite and keep complaining about bad conditions and your mediocre equipment there, (because you will be complaining there, too) or you can make do and play the cards you've been dealt. Because if there's one thing that any photographer more experienced than I am can tell you, there's a winning shot everywhere! Sure, there are situations that are tough to fuck up (think Yosemite, pitch #32, warm evening light), but in general, finding the winner shot is about looking for it where you are and not about wishing for better circumstances.

This weekend, my girlfriend and I happened to watch the Munich city marathon and I took a few shots of the runners as they sped by. As always, I noticed myself looking at all the pros with their press credentials, Canon 1d Mark IIIs or Nikon D3s, 70-200mm 2.8s and all the other stuff that makes a little photographer like myself salivate. After taking the first couple of images, I quickly noted that I had neither the position nor the fast lenses to get the winning shots like those guys could. So what to do? Easy. Make do. What I mean with make do is not taking images that don't work in your current situation. If you're not standing in the right place (where only the guys with press credentials can stand) it won't do you any good to keep on shooting from the wrong position.

What you can do, however, is do something different. Experiment. Think about the pros again. They have to sell their images to their magazines. If they make good shots they will get paid, if they don't they won't. They won't be taking any risks. So this is your chance to make shots that are worth your while. Don't get into a pissing contest with these guys on their terms. Do your own thing and try to do something the others don't. Be creative, that's what it's all about.

Five for Friday - Vol 02

2009-10-09T12:29:00.000+02:00

#1 Watch the full Return2Sender movie. Stumbled upon this last night, not sure if it's approved by Sender films. It seems it has been up for quite some time, so I guess they are OK with it. It's awesome and I'd strongly suggest you buy it, along with First Ascent and especially The Sharp End, the best climbing movie out there imho!

#2 Dave Graham doing the first ascent of The Island, fb 8c in Fontainebleau. Beautiful "old school" font boulder...

#3 Scary solo... don't miss this one! Thanks @Stephan for showing me this great vid!

#4 Onion News Network on the revolutionary new MacBook Wheel.

#5 1x.com - A website similar to Flickr and the other photo sharing websites, with the big difference that every image is checked out first and only the good ones are admitted. Now they also offer a photobook with images from their website. Check them out if you haven't done so already!

#6 Getty Images' Harry How talks about getting into professional sports photography and the equipment that he uses. Part One , Two & Three

#7 Following up on Toni Lamprecht's video of his first ascent "El Varano", this is a clip of what it's like not to climb El Varano and not having a lot of people to break your fall... Good effort though!

Report: Kochel Oct 7th 09

2009-10-08T10:18:00.011+02:00

Hi everybody!

We had another awesome day of climbing Kochel yesterday. In fact, yesterday was even a little more awesome than usual ;-) At first, conditions weren't really promising. Weather was really hot (really bad friction on rock that has bad friction even in deep winter) and I felt like dying on the hike up to the crag. I did some shots of my friend Stephan working on his project and suddenly he did the crux dyno which he hadn't managed to stick yet! Wow!

I was really happy for him and that got me psyched to try sticking the crux move on my project. Thanks to Stephan patiently filming every single attempt, I learned quite a lot about that move and came quite close to sticking it. Although the measure of progress might seem really small, I feel it was an important step towards linking this boulder.

Above you can watch a quick&dirty vid of my progress so far... as I said before, I'm not that good at editing video, so please forgive the rather "raw" quality of the clip! The clip was shot on the Nikon D90. I still struggle with getting good image quality on it, but it's definitely a great feature to have!

Hope you like the new stuff, have a great day everyone!

Cheers,
Bruno

Black & White Edits II

2009-10-06T17:50:00.008+02:00

Looking for more b&w material to decorate our apartment, I redid a couple of images from my archives. No big content this time, just a couple of images to tide you over...

Tomorrow I'm off to Kochel again, hope I'll make some progress on my project. I'll try to record some video and -if I climb it someday- edit a short clip of the boulder. Not too good at handling video, but I'll try to make it work.

Stay tuned...

Five for Friday - Vol. 01

2009-10-01T11:44:00.021+02:00

Borrowing an idea from countless other sites, I decided to share some of my favourite youtube clips, links and other stuff I find on the web on a somewhat regular schedule. I'll call it Five for Friday, although I'm not sure that I'll stick to either the five or friday rule in the future. Anyway, nothing big, just a couple of fun clips you might or might not know, loosely connected to climbing / photography or life in general. So here's the first edition, hope I got something you like!

#1 Sonnie Trotter doing the first ascent of Cobra Crack, 5.14 (trad). I often prefer raw climbing movies that don't feature too many harsh cuts and special effects and spend a little time actually showing sequences instead.

#2 Toni Lamprecht doing El Varano in Albarracin. When Toni came back from that trip he mumbled something about never bouldering without a T-Shirt again...

#3 Professional photographer JoeMcNally talking about his book "The Moment it clicks" in front of Google's employees. There are so many great little stories hidden in this video I can't even begin to count them.

#4 Scene from Dodgeball- A true underdog story featuring a cameo by Lance Armstrong. Hilarious and motivating...

#5 Probably my favourite climbing movie, The Sharp End. Inspiring, scary and very very scary. Here's the trailer, check it out and go buy that movie!

#6 The late great Jonny Copp talking about alpine climbing around the world.

#7 And for the last one, a link to Manolo Zanolla's account of his unbelievable first ascent of Eternit, a 9a slab...

Toni Lamprecht, Kochel

2009-09-30T12:58:00.008+02:00

Hi everybody! Toni just got back from some 6 weeks of climbing in the Gorge de Verdon, so yesterday we headed out to Kochel for some climbing. He usually gets out of school around half-past one and we arrived in Kochel at about three o'clock. As it was just us two I didn't have a chance to take pictures of him during climbing, but I made a couple of pictures of Toni getting ready. I didn't mind in the least as Toni is always an interesting character to photograph and I also wanted to try out some lighting ideas for future use.

Toni is always great to photograph but I'm never exactly sure why that is. One great aspect is that he can completely ignore my presence as a photographer even while he is talking to me as a person. This way, I don't have to put time aside just for shooting and we don't lose precious time.
Of course, Toni's endless patience when it comes to having a flash shoved into his face is also a major factor in making my life as a photographer pretty easy.

One obvious drawback of the crag we visited is light. There simply isn't much. Trees are still in full leaf and at about 4 o'clock the place is basically dark. I chose to go with a pretty dark look (which is pretty close to the real look of the place anyway) and used my SB 600 off-camera as pretty much the only light source. Exposure was around 1/40th @ f5.6 - f8 with the flash set to rear curtain sync. This way, some greenish light from the forest could seep into the background and the sky could still peek through the leaves above. The rest was pretty straightforward, I just set down the flash somewhere to camera left and burned away.

Regarding climbing, the day was pretty succesful, too. Toni worked on a new project with some pretty evil moves and I checked out a beautiful line right next to it. Pretty excited about it, on my second top-rope try most moves already felt pretty good and only the crux (which is at the very top) still feels totally out of reach. After I did my last tries in pitch black darkness with only my headlamp shedding a little light on the route's holds, we packed up and headed back to the car.

Can't wait to get back on the route, hope it stays dry for a few days....

See you soon, more to come!
Cheers
Bruno

Corey Rich - King Lines Images

2009-09-29T08:02:00.005+02:00

I have mentioned Corey Rich a couple of times on this blog already but never came around to show some of his images. Just now I remembered the great preview clip of BigUp's King Lines movie featuring Chris Sharma. While most trailers only feature snippets from the finished movie, this King Lines clip was done to promote Apple's multimedia workflow and features a great mix of movie scenes and still images done by Corey. This clip is a work of art in itself and I can't recommend it enough. Don't miss it!

Back online

2009-09-25T12:52:00.005+02:00

Hi everybody,

after a week with no internet connection and telephone I'm all set again for more work on the blog. Had a few great bouldering sessions in Kochel these last two weeks and start to feel like my old self again...

While checking up on my myface, spacebook and whatnot accounts I stumbled upon this little stop-motion video I made of Toni Lamprecht's boulder Assassin, Monkey and Man. I can't even begin to describe how low-fi this clip is (no music, small images, bad quality) but I thought there's no harm in sharing it anyway :-)

That's it for now, more (recent) stuff is in the works, so stay tuned!

Cheers
Bruno

PS
Please drop me a line in the comments if the video doesn't display correctly, I'm not exactly a wizard with these things!

Experiments in monochrome

2009-09-15T13:35:00.008+02:00

We're working on renovating our apartment and Annie had the idea of hanging up some black&white climbing shots for decoration. So far I haven't done any b&w shots but I browsed through my archive today and played around with some older unused images. Here are a few examples, hope you like them:

These shots were all done with my D90 and converted to black&white in DxO optics pro. For the motion blur I dialed in a slow shutterspeed (1/3 of a second or more I think), set my flash to rear curtain sync and pulled the camera upwards while taking the shot. (I put my SB600 on a monopod and held it close to the ground to get the light beneath the overhang)

The shots below were made on the Brauneck guidebook shoot, but I haven't been satisfied with the colour edits. I like the B&W versions, though.

The shots below are "genuine" B&W images, shot on my dad's old Pentax ME with ASA 400 film. I like the results, although it was pretty expensive getting them processed. (About 20€ for the roll...)

So that's it for today, I'll keep diging in my archives, who knows what I might find.

Cheers

Bruno

Print: Climax Magazine Part II

2009-09-14T19:46:00.008+02:00

Got the O.K. from the guys at Climax magazine, so here is a scan featuring two of my images from the mag's latest issue. (The shot in the top right is by Daniel Gebel) I'm totally psyched about the layout, the whole magazine is a work of art. Check out their website and (if you can read german) get the magazine, of course!

On the personal front, I'm looking forward to a fresh bouldering season in Kochel, can't wait to get back in the game. The last two/three months I've been somewhat lacking in motivation and didn't spend much time climbing. The past year has been fantastic but I went all-out through last fall/winter until I felt completely burned out somewhere around June. I spent most of my free time cycling and running and that has been great, too, but now I feel refreshed and hungry again. Also I'm several pounds lighter which might also be a good thing and once my power is back, I think I might be able to push myself a little further than last year. Let's see what happens, I think it will be great fun in any case! I sure hope you will stick with me and keep visiting the site, just let me know in the comments if you have an idea how to improve this blog.

Cheers

Bruno

European Youth Series, Munich '09

2009-09-14T18:02:00.016+02:00

Decided to watch the European Youth Series Climbing competetion last weekend. Turned out to be quite exciting and we had a great time watching all those awesomely strong kids. Was a little scary, too, some 13 year old girls do have broader shoulders than me...

After I spent the last two months with a very moderate motivation for climbing, we left the venue on sunday afternoon with sweaty hands and a returned hunger for monkey games. Of course we hit the climbing gym afterwards, too, and it turned out to be a great all-out session. Anyway, the hunger is back, more stuff is soon to come :-)

Francois Legrand watching his french Équipe.

Report: Guidebook Shoot Aug 09

2009-09-01T16:41:00.009+02:00

Let me apologize for the long silence on the blog front, but I finally got around to shoot climbing again, and pretty much of it, too! First I spent a great weekend with my girlfriend Annie in South Tyrol where I had started climbing in the first place. I showed her some of the routes and boulders there and I'm happy that she loved it as much as I do. It's just a small crag, but the rock is great and every route is different. Still one of my favourite places to climb! Here's a shot of her in her current project.

Right after our return, I was already packing my bags for a shoot in the Brauneck area in Bavaria. A friend of mine is currently working on a climbing guide / topo for the area and asked me to take some photos for it.

Planning & Gear

Planning is important. In this case, planning consisted of having sushi with a friend of mine (who was also going to be the main climber for the shoot), where we went through the kinds of shots we wanted to get and how we were going to get them. As I didn't know the area, I scribbled down little sketches of the images I had in mind and my pal told me whether a suitable location was available.

Another important aspect was to set up a timetable for the different shots. I was to arrive late monday morning and leave on tuesday evening. Light would be best on Monday evening and Tuesday morning, so we needed to get the "impressive landscape with climber in it"-shots in this timeframe, while the closer shots of climbers in action could be done in less good light.
At home I got my gear ready and, since I had to get to the location by train, was quite relieved that everything fit into one big backpack and a big camera bag. For the climbing aspect, a jumar and GriGri are probably the most important pieces of equipment. Together with some quickdraws you can MacGyver a good vantage point almost anywhere on a crag, although, of course, the best shooting angle will invariably be at your most uncomfortable body position. The rest consisted of the usual stuff, Camera body + backup, lenses, flash, loads of memory cards, my trusty iBook, an external harddrive and all the other little things that make climbing photography so much fun and so expensive.

Shooting

On my arrival I didn't bother to stash my luggage at our refuge and headed to the crag right after I got off the cablecar. (First time I ever took an iBook to a crag...) The guys were already there and they had a fixed rope ready for me there, as well. This was the first time I was along solely for taking pictures and I felt a much higher pressure of getting things right, so I wanted to get started immediately. Once I get the first handful of acceptable images I'm much calmer, but until then I'm usually not the most relaxed man on earth. Anyway, I got my gear ready and jumared up for the first couple of images.

Shooting while hanging from a rope isn't comfortable most of the time. Along with making sure you're always safe you also have to make sure that your gear is safe and that you don't kill anyone by accidentally dropping that 500mm f2.8 of yours while changing lenses... Speaking of changing lenses! That always gets my heart rate up, although I should probably start getting used to it. For shooting from a rope, a messenger type camera bag is great! (I use the Tamrac System 6 bag) A bag like this can be slung over your shoulder for climbing/jumaring and you can access all your gear without much danger of dropping anything. It also is great for changing lenses as you can do this with the camera and lenses held above the open bag, so even if you drop something, it will be landing in your bag and not on someone's head.

Angles

When shooting from above, getting the right angle can be tricky. Depending on the type of the climb, whether it's a slab or an overhang, you can easily turn an awesome climb into something really not that awesome. As always, the more you shoot, the better your understanding of how your shooting angle will influence the final image will be become. One thing that's good most of the time is to try to lean away from the wall as far as possible. This way, the steepness of the route will translate much better to the image. The closer your camera is to the rock, the more it will seem that the climber is lying down on a rock instead of climbing something friggin' steep. Don't take this as an absolute rule, though! Especially when shooting a wide-angle close to the climber, having the camera quite close to the rock might look cool. Experiment, keep checking your image review and shift your angle accordingly.
Of course, the angle you want is always the absolutely most uncomfortable position possible, but that's the price of a nice image. Some of images, I made without being able to breathe because I was hanging so awkardly... Fun!

Depth of field

Another great way to a shitty picture is to shoot a long zoom with a large depth of field. "So you're climbing a 1000 foot wall? I don't care, with my 200mm zoom at f11 I'll make it look like you just left the ground, muahhaha..." You get the picture. The big zoom moves the fore- and background closer together and the small aperture (resulting in big depth of field) finishes the image off by making the climber a part of the ground. Not good.

As mentioned before in my Basics post, the way to go is either a wide-angle (making the ground fall away from the climber, creating depth) or a tele with a bigger aperture (smaller depth of field; the background is blurred and doesn't distract from the climber).

Depth of field also can be used to highlight certain aspects of a climb. This is a shot of an easier route that features one terrific jug after another. For the guide I wanted to show the reader these huge jugs and whet the appetite for some relaxed climbing, so I chose a small DoF (small f-number) and focussed on the jug, leaving the climber just a blurry shape in the background.

Light

As mentioned above, when you're planning to shoot all day, thinking about the quality of light is essential. In general, closely cropped shots of climbers can be done in any light. Nice, warm evening or morning light is great, of course, but this short timespan of great light is usually better spent on wider shots with some nice landscape mixed in. Accordingly, I tried to get a good amount of close action shots out of the way in the time between 10am and 4pm where the light is not that great. Afterwards, we left the crag and headed over to the area's trademark rock. It's a nice looking formation with a sculpture of an alpine ibex on top. I took a load of different shots in that area, trying out different ideas.

Silhouettes

The next morning we got up at 6am and headed out to another crag for some early morning shots. My pal Benni got on one of the routes and patiently climbed it again and again while I blasted away into the sunrise.

Creating silhouettes like this isn't difficult, technically, as long as your camera has a exposure memory button or at least an exposure compensation button. I used the exposure memory, exposed for the sky behind the climber (which is much much brighter than him) and switched to manuall focus for easier handling. (Autofocus can get a little unreliable when shooting into the sun) Now it's just a matter of cutting the sun against a sharp edge and voilá. (For accurately catching the beautiful morning light, you might dial in a warmer white balance if the colours turn out too cold/flat)

After some 100 images and almost going blind from shooting into the sun we finally called it quits and got on to other routes. (Do be careful with this, you can kill your eyesight pretty fast this way!!!)

Post

After getting home, the not-so-fun part of downloading memory cards and sorting images started. I made a subfolder for each climber / route, so I could process them in DxO Optics Pro in smaller packages. (My PC isn't the fastest and DxO requires an awful lot of juice) As of today, I'm almost done with the post-processing. Hope you like the results!

Print: Climax Magazine

2009-08-19T17:44:00.006+02:00

Great news! (for me anyway...) Austrian newcomer climbing magazine Climax features 3 of my shots for a big article / interview on Toni Lamprecht in their August / October issue. So excited! Mailman delivered it today and I have to say, it's the best magazine on climbing I've read so far! Awesome style and layout, great images (**cough**) and a fantastic read. Make sure you get a copy, you won't regret it!

One of the shots they used

More on Climax in an upcoming post, hope I'll be able to post a scan of "my" part...

EDIT: A scan of the articles can be found in Part II of this post here

News: Back Home

2009-08-17T21:13:00.011+02:00

My better half in front of our temporary home

Hi everybody, we're back from our short vacation and I'm finally starting to get a grip on things here at home again. The plan was to spend a week at Lago di Garda in Italy, but the flu hit us and made us change plans. So we ended up in South Tyrolia where I have spent much of my childhood.

Weather has been great and aside from some quick rides on the bike we spent most of our time lying in the sun and going out for the best pizza that money can buy. Not much climbing lately, I expect this to change soon, though. Instead a quick shot of our breakfast table...

No climbing?! Well, almost...

Hang in there, real climbing shots and posts are coming soon!
Cheers
Bruno

Report: Bouldering at Zillertal 22/07/09

2009-07-27T17:11:00.013+02:00

Spent a great day at Zillertal, Austria this week, both bouldering and shooting. I thought I'd use this as an example how I like to make the "standard" climbing images without any big setup or equipment. If I was focussing exclusively on shooting I'd probably bring more gear, especially a ladder which is extremely useful for shooting bouldering. Instead, this was a simple shoot with just my pal Duy and me, trying to make some cool images without missing out on the climbing itself.

Working the Plan

My main objective was a beautiful boulder called Moonwalk, which I wanted to take pictures of as well as working on it myself. Following up on my recent post on planning, I thought it might be fun showing you a sketch of the "planned" image as well as the final outcome:

That was the image I was hunting, and as the weather was great on our arrival, we headed for that boulder immediately. I quickly shot a row of images like that, tweaking and varying small things until I was confident that I had caught it the way I wanted it.

Improvise

Having a plan is important. But having a plan does not mean you have to feel limited by it. I like to get the "safe" (planned) shots out of the way first, but once I feel that I have a decent "padding" of good enough shots, I like to start experimenting. Go wild. Climb on trees, boulders or neighboring routes, use flash and try out different lenses.

Think about your plan. Look at your camera's LCD. Does the image look the way you planned it? Look around. Is there something you might have missed before? Have you made the shots you wanted to make? Great! But that doesn't mean that there aren't any great shots left out there. Maybe there's an angle or a setup you didn't consider before. Don't worry, you're not going home empty handed, so now is the time to try out something new.

Debrief

Back home, sorting and editing the images, I started asking myself what I would like to do better / different next time. Playing around, I suddenly noticed the rock's great structure and did a couple of close crops, clipping all the edges of the boulder. I like the look of these images but I wish I had noticed it while shooting as I lost a lot of resolution to the heavy cropping. I'm a little upset about that but I guess this is the price of learning. Another idea that I can add to my repertoire....

In fact, this is something I'd like to stress: in growing as a photographer, you build a mental library of photographic possibilities that you can use as a base for future shots. For example, I know that "cutting" the sun against a sharp object (rock, house, tree or person) can create sunstars which can add quite a lot of magic to your shots. Knowing this, my brain goes click when it recognizes a situation where such a shot is possible. The more images you take, and the more you think about it before, during and afterwards, the bigger this library in your head will become. As you build this repertoire, your odds of getting good shots regularly will increase over time and you will become more and more flexible.

Keep this in mind. Keep trying out new ideas while you're shooting. At home, write down any ideas you might have and take those notes with you the next time. There is an infinite number of great images yet to be made but most of the underlying principles stay the same and can be learned, studied and practiced. Expand your repertoire, I try to expand mine.

Basics: Having a plan

2009-07-14T11:41:00.014+02:00

"The average russky doesn't take a dump, son, without a plan..."

-The Hunt for Red October

Everybody takes a good picture once in a while. Point the camera somewhere, bang away and a good image is bound to fall in your lap someday. I took the first image I got published in a magazine some 4 weeks after buying my first camera. How? I lucked out. I just started shooting, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. Those images are fine and the fact that you lucked out in taking them doesn't diminish them. But if you want to sustain that and keep turning out good images on a regular basis, you have to become good enough to create good work without surrendering to fate and luck.

So what makes a good image? Does it tell the truth? Is it accurate? Does it make your palms sweat? Does it move you? Does it make you want to buy the pictured product? Does it make you want to climb El Capitan?

How do we judge an image? We look at it, (subconsciously) recognize the image's purpose and compare it to the result. Judging an image is only possible by comparing it to it's intention. Now you might say that many people don't spend a single thought about anything when they're taking images. That might be true. Yet any image that is made intentionally (meaning you didn't just press the shutter-release accidentally) has an inherent purpose. This might be a conscious thought or just be the basic "Whoah that tree looks cool!" stimulation we sometimes feel. Yet even such an image has an intention as it was taken to express that this tree did in fact look cool.

This is where having a plan comes in. Pointing the camera somewhere and hoping for the best might give you a great image. It's unlikely, but possible. The Gods of Photography might have mercy on you and inject an accidental meaning into a shot you took without thinking. This might work, but it is hardly reliable. The only way to make good images on a regular basis is by planning. Think about the image. See it before you press the shutter release. Knowing everthing about f-stops, ISO's and off-camera flash helps you make that image real but that is only the second step. The first step is seeing it. Seeing it without thinking about the how, seeing it the way you want it. Once you see it, you can set up your flashes, boost your ISO and burn away with 20fps to catch that image. Do anything that will help you catch that image. But you have to know what to look for. Have a plan.

Well great, so how do I do that, dumbass?!

Practice. Seeing is a skill that takes practice like any other. Don't worry that maybe you don't have the "photographer's eye"! People are not born with it. This is not about talent. As a matter of fact, I don't care much for the concept of talent. Worrying about being talented, whether you think you are or you think you're not, blocks your desire to improve. People refer to themselves as being untalented much too often. In school, I always claimed I was untalented in math. I'm not. If anything, I was lacking the desire to improve. I didn't want to become good at it. Talking about lack of talent was nothing but a cheap excuse.

Practice sounds like work, which sounds like a big zero on the fun scale. Don't worry, it's not. You can do this everywhere, all the time, no matter if you carry a camera on you or not. Simply allow yourself to dream. Dream about the next climbing trip, shoot or your next vacation. What do you want the pictures to look like? Look at other people's shots. What impresses you about those images? What can you use for your own shots? Let yourself be inspired. Pretty soon you will have a whole gallery in your head, full of shots you haven't yet taken, but where all the hard stuff is already done and you only have to press the shutter release to seal the deal.

Is that all?

No. Having a plan doesn't guarantee a winner shot. Taking it and getting it the way you want it can still be tricky. You still have to be skilled enough to make it real. Look at the above shot. In my head this image is a lot better. The image in my head is a winner. The climber's shadow is better defined, the climber's face is lighted better and loads of little imperfections are improved. The plan was sound but the execution wasn't up to it. So far, I haven't been able to make this image the way I want it. But getting this image is now only a matter of the f-stops and flash settings and all that other technical stuff. The plan is there, I see the image, I only have to figure out the execution. I just have to make it real.

Vacation

2009-07-08T16:28:00.007+02:00

Hi everybody!

Packing my bags for a short vacation / family visit. I'll be back on Sunday night. Probably won't have internet connection, so hang on until I get back! Thanks!

Working on some cool new stuff, stay tuned, will tweet, mail and holler when it's done ;-)

I might get a chance to check my emails, so if anything's pressing write me here.

Have a nice weekend, see you next week!

Cheers

Bruno

Portfolio Page online

2009-07-02T14:53:00.003+02:00

After changing around the visual appearance of this blog, I decided to update my portfolio page, too. You'll find it here or by clicking on the Portfolio link above. Let me know what you think! I hope this page displays correctly on different browsers / screens, let me know if anything is off!

Looking forward to seeing you there,

have fun!

Bruno

Big Picture - How much is too much?

2009-07-02T11:22:00.009+02:00

One of the big issues with modern photography is the easy possibility to drastically alter shots in Photoshop and similar applications. In this context, the question of how much post processing is "allowed" is often asked and seems tricky to answer. Even a JPG directly from the camera is only an interpretation of the sensor data, done, in this case, by the camera itself. There are so many ways to change a photo that it seems practically impossible to draw a clear line between what's acceptable and what's not.

When I started writing this post I didn't think I'd be able to provide an answer even for myself. I was torn between the fact that I love the possibilities of polishing my shots and the fear that some photoshop punk might steal my thunder by "faking" better images... But after rewriting this post a couple of times I suddenly realized it: everything goes! Why? Because there's nothing wrong with it. This fear that less skilled shooters might somehow fabricate a better picture by means of photoshop than experienced shooters can achieve by "fair means"? Forget about it! You cannot photoshop a great image out of a crappy shot. Don't worry, it doesn't work. You can polish a raw gem into a jewel, but you need to have this gem in the first place.

Without this raw quality, no amount of post-processing will save your shot. Realizing that, I suddenly felt completely relaxed about the whole issue. There's no need defending something if it's not in danger. Being creative, working on your abilities and refining your technique, you will always be ahead. You've got nothing to worry about. Liking the look of an image -processed or not- is a matter of taste, it's not a question of what's allowed.

Some things I realized working on this post summed up:

-Don't mistake judging what's acceptable with what suits your taste! Photoshopping the crap out of a photo is the right of any photographer, not liking the result is the right of every viewer.

-A great image cannot be faked, you cannot photoshop dogshit into art. Just as with polishing gems, post processing holds the danger of destroying the raw material. Think about the kid playing with his father's gun...

-Time spent on bitching about manipulated images might be better spent on becoming a better photographer.

-A great image is a great image is a great image; do what you like, the only thing to be judged is the final result.

Don't hesitate to disagree! I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Bruno

Cosmetics Part III

2009-07-01T14:19:00.003+02:00

Ok, as you might have noticed, the "I'll just change some colours on my blog" cosmetics idea from last night turned into a full blown plastic surgery... (I can think of about 10-40 very bad puns involving recently deceased people, but I'm not going there)

Anyway, I kinda like the result, some posts are not completely consistent with the new layout yet, but all the important posts are up to speed. I hope you like the new look, both praise and criticism is always welcome!

Take care

Bruno

Cosmetics Part II

2009-07-01T09:15:00.002+02:00

Still working on my site and reaching awesome new heigts in screwing things up... Hang in there, I'll either manage to work things out or kill the whole thing altogether :-) Sorry for any inconvenience!

Cosmetics...

2009-06-30T20:24:00.006+02:00

Hi all,

I got a little vexed by the visual style of my blog and decided to change it around a little. For reading I found the white text on black background quite tough on the eyes, although I prefer viewing images on black. I played around with black borders/frames for the images but that looked like ads for a funeral service... anyway I'm going with the white background for a while, not sure if I'll keep it.

I'll probably change minor things in the next few days, feel free to comment on what you like / don't like!

Suggestions appreciated!

Take care,

Bruno

Interview: Udo Neumann

2009-06-29T07:42:00.009+02:00

Udo "Udini" Neumann, renowned climbing photographer / moviemaker has graciously agreed to answer some of my questions about his views on climbing photography. You can view many of his shots and videos at his website or on his YouTube account.

Udo's shots can be found regularly on the cover of climbing magazines around the world. He is also an accomplished film maker, having made movies like Evolution Revolution 1 & 2, Climbing at the limit of human performance and Psicobloc 101. He has also participated in the production of BigUps' hit King Lines.
His work features famous climbers like Chris Sharma, Toni Lamprecht, Klem Loskot or Adam Ondra. He is also the author of the rock climbing books "Lizenz zum Klettern - License to Climb", "Performance Rock Climbing" (with Dale Goddard) and "Der Elfte Grad - Climbing at the limit of human performance". Especially the latter is pure gold for climbing photographers, a fantastic "coffee table" book, full of climbing and bouldering images, mixed in with great stories from Udo, Klem Loskot, Toni Lamprecht and others. I bought a copy years ago and I still love browsing through it when looking for inspiration. You can order Udo's books and DVDs at his online webshop, I suggest you have a look!
Currently Udo is working on a new book focussing on bouldering all over the world. It will be in the style of a coffee table book again, offering loads of cool bouldering images from around the world, mixed in with short text passages. I'll keep you informed on this project, totally psyched myself!

Now without any further babbling on my part:

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• Hi Udo, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Let's get right into it: Do you have any photography heroes?
Many, not for sheer photographers competence though, but for an eye for situations. Martin Parr comes to mind...

• How did you get started in photography?
Early 80s, took pictures of white water kayaking, printed them and sold them to the paddlers

• What was your most memorable moment related to photography?
Any moment, I love hunting for good shots! I'm always amazed how much I enjoy the sheer act...

• Before going on a shoot, do you ever get nervous that you might not be able to fulfill your own expectations (or that of others)?

No, not as far as I'm concerned! Really dislike the dependency on the fucking technical issues though, especially nowadays. Have to remind myself "keep it simple, stupid!"

• Best suggestion you ever got about photography?

When I started, there were so many rules! I don't recall if there was anything helpful. Have to think about it...

• Is there an aspect of (climbing) photography that is often overlooked or not given enough thought?
Static, posed and tightly framed doesn't do it for me, I like to see where the climber comes from and where he/she is moving next. If you catch an off-balance move, that's even better!

• Do you read any climbing / photography related blogs? Anything you would recommend?
Vincent Laforet's Blog, Joe McNally's Blog (very interesting for strobe technique!) and a lot more, depending what I'm interested in!

• Talks about photography often turn into talks about photography equipment. How important is the technical aspect of photography to you?
Well, faster (lens and frame rate) is always better, higher ISO is always better, so if a technical development allows me to do what I couldn't before, I'm very interested. Otherwise, zero!

• How much do you shoot on a typical climbing day or session?
A lot nowadays, sometimes a couple of 100 to allow for interesting sequences for use in film or panoramic shots!

• Do you shoot digital / film or both?
Started with film in 1981, had a darkroom and everything, digital since 2004, for me, film is over...

• Your work often features quite some amount of post-processing. Where do you draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable alterations / manipulations?
A shot has not much to do with reality, but tries to squeeze the whole experience into a tiny 2- dimensional picture. To help, I work the colors, curves and contrast. All darkroom techniques mainly, or things that I did with film too, like cross processing. I very very rarely paint or clone though!

• What software do you usually use for post-processing work? Do you have a specific „workflow“?
Do 90% of the work on a shot with Capture NX (see above) and only the rest with PS. Photo management is a BIG issue since I have about 100.000 to take care of nowadays!

• Your favourite photography gadget? (clamps, lenses, lighting equipment...)
THE STUFF I HAVE WITH ME!!! I love the lensbabies, the strobes, the fast glass, all that, but we have to carry it all! So, even if I have just the smallest camera with me, I'm still stoked to take pictures! I love the "hunting" aspect of photography, the "being in the moment", if you are too much in love with any one gadget, you tend to loose that!

• You once wrote that the tradtional „static“ style of climbing photography didn’t satisfy you anymore. Your Book „Der 11. Grad“ displays a slightly unconventional style as it focuses more on displaying a sense of motion instead of going for the clean (almost sterile) look of most climbing photographers. From a financial viewpoint, does having your own recognizable style make it easier or harder to publish your work?

Well, we all hope for some "fresh wind" in printed climbing media, don't we? If "Climax" (new german climbing magazine) lasts, we hopefully will see much more interesting shots then what we have in Germany now. From a "financial viewpoint" (is there one in climbing photography?) I think any photographer should try for an own recognizable style and bring new ideas to the game. Most climbing shots we see are being made by people with a camera that happen to be "there". This tendency will grow with better, simpler and cheaper cameras and is totally cool for me. If you are interested in taking pictures beyond the news factor though, I think you have to try for your own recognizable style to give your shots a bit more!

• Do you feel that making a living in professional photography is becoming more difficult? Does the internet have a positive or negative effect on the chances of professionals to make a living?
If you are a photographer because you own some nice gear, good luck! If you are documenting a vibrant scene and/or have a talent for story telling, I think the opportunities are bigger than they ever were!

• Have you ever had problems with people using your images without permission?
Of course, but I try not to be bothered ;-)

• Do you still remember the first time you got paid for a photograph?
see above: Early 80s, took pictures of white water kayaking, printed them and sold them to the paddlers

Thank you so much for taking the time for this interview! I owe you one!
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Basics: Gelling your flash

2009-06-27T11:06:00.024+02:00

After reading Joe McNally's book "The Hot Shoe Diaries" I bought myself a set of coulered gels for my flash. No excuses, go get this book if you're at all interested in flash photography! Hell, even if you're not, after Joe's book you will be.

Anyway, after all the money I spent on equipment I'd say that the 5€ for a set of colour conversion gels were probably the best photography-related investment I ever made.

What's a gel?!

Gels are sheets of coloured plastic that you can tape over a lightsource, a flash for example. The exact colour shades are standardised. For flash photography the (probably) most used shade is called CTO ("colour temperature orange"), making the flash's light much warmer. The shades are further classified in strengths like 1/4 CTO or Full CTO. Other often used gels are CTB ("colour temperature blue" - for cooler light) and green gels. Gels are often used for correcting unwanted colour casts with artificial light, yet they can also be used to create all sorts of lighting effects, from imitating the evening sun to "going Blade Runner on the whole deal" (quote => Joe McNally - Hotshoe Diaries).

Using Gels...

In practice, it's amazing how big a difference a single sheet of orange plastic can make. In the above shot I put the camera in manual mode, exposed for the background and dialed the flash to half power. The warm light from the left is simply my SB600 with a 1/2 CTO gel taped over it. I put the flash on a monopod and held it close to the left side of the frame. Done.

Where to get them...

Buying gels is new terrain for me, too. You can get big sheets, but they are not cheap and might be too much for casual use. A cheap alternative is ordering sample books. The big sheets are normally used for stage productions where you need large quantities while the sample books are very small but big enough to fit perfectly on a photographer's flash. They are usually free, if you order them at the manufacturer you only have to pay for postage.

I got my set at the local Calumet in Munich paying only the 5€ they paid for postage. It's a Lee filter sample pack containing about a billion different colour shades. You will find CTO and CTB (colour temperature blue) gels as well as many other shades you could use.

For the full package on how to light anything, make sure to check out Dave Hobby's Strobist blog! You'll find more advice on lighting technique there than you'll ever want to know ;-)

Below are two shots from my first attempt with gels... I used a thick sheet of orange plastic I found lying around somewhere; Colours turned out to be all over the place and the result is definitely unusual :-) Those images are a little extreme even for my taste but it did get me excited to keep on experimenting!

News: Upcoming Interview - Udo Neumann

2009-06-26T08:01:00.010+02:00

Just wanted to let you know about the upcoming interview with professional climbing photographer and all-around cool guy Udo Neumann. Udo is shooting regularly with legendary climbers like Chris Sharma, Toni Lamprecht or Adam Ondra and the author of several books on climbing as well as an accomplished filmmaker. Udo sent me his answers yesterday and I'm currently working on finishing the post. Check out his website in the meantime! The interview will be up on Monday, so stay tuned!

Also I'm currently trying to get a grip on using twitter. Follow me if you'd like to be notified of new posts and other news concerning my blog.
Have a great one!
Bruno

Basics: Starting out - Climbing Photography Fundamentals

2009-06-24T14:54:00.015+02:00

Climbing photography can be frustrating... maybe you have read about my recent bouldering session in "I suck" where I just couldn't deliver a single good shoot although I had done this exact same style of photography many times before.

So what is so hard about climbing photography?! First, not every location is the Yosemite Valley, Cerro Torre or Ceuse. We mortals spend most of our time in dark wooded areas with little in the way of a view, blue sky or even green grass. I'm not saying that creating shots like Simon Carter, Heinz Zak or Corey Rich is easy, but with Half Dome or El Capitan as a backdrop the chance to deliver a really abysmal shot is a little smaller.

In this and future posts I'll try to convey to you the experiences I made in the (limited) time that I have been shooting climbing. First lesson: When shooting climbers, try aiming for the torso as it's easier to hit. (Kidding, sorry about that)
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The butt-shot

The first climbing shots one usually takes are described by two words: butt shot

So the first rule of shooting climbers is this: Shooting a climber from below is almost never good. The face is usually not visible, you have trouble conveying a sense of dynamic or motion and -most importantly- most people's behinds are not that great to look at.
There are exceptions, especially when shooting bouldering, but as a general rule:
shooting from below => butt shots => no no
Instead, look around. Most climbing areas offer rocks, trees or other elevated terrain that will give you better shooting angles. If you want to go to a little more trouble, fix a rope in a neighboring route and shoot from there. (Having a GriGri or similar device pays off for that.) -more on that in an upcoming post-

above shot: got this by climbing a small rock to the right of the route. Not a great image but much better than what I would have got by shooting from below.

When shooting rock climbing I like to be shooting downwards to the left or right from the climber. Straight down is also possible, but if you're hanging from a rope you might have a harder time getting all your gear out of the way (Shoes, legs, rope etc). Depending on the climber it can also be more difficult to capture his or her face as many climbers often don't look up.

Faces

Climbing photography is people photography. There are exceptions, obviously, but it's usually good to capture the climber's face. When trying to convey how demanding the route or boulder is on the climber, the face is usually the most revealing. Bulging muscles are fine, but a screaming face and blue-ish facial colour can tell the whole story in a single image.

Timing

Practice your timing. In climbing photography it can be difficult to convey a sense of dynamic and motion. Try capturing the climber as he is reaching for the hold or jumping. Timing is much more important than having a camera going at 9 frames per second. If all else fails, sit down in front of your TV and shoot the sports channel... (I've forgotten where I read that great advice, I'll post his / her name as soon as I remember)

Creating a sense of height and depth

Shooting downwards, you have to bear in mind how different focal lengths will affect the impact of your shot.

The above image was shot at 200mm. The problem with this image is that due to the shortening effect of the long lens, the background moves closer to the subject. It looks like the climber has just left the ground when in fact he was some 200-300 feet above the ground. One way to counter this effect is by shooting at larger apertures (smaller f-numbers). This way, the ground below the climber will be out of focus and not weaken your picture. Using a wide-angle lens has the opposite effect. The ground seems to fall away, giving the viewer a sense of the height. I prefer using a wide angle lens, but you do have to get close enough. (Which sometimes means hanging 1-3 feet above the climber --> accidentily kicking the climber is a very real possibility, I am not kidding!)

Light

Ever notice that most of the great climbing shots are done in great light? Most professional climbing photographers shoot in the early morning or evening to get that special light. For some general advice on getting the great light, look here! If the light isn't right and you don't have the chance to wait for it to become better, think about using flash. Even the most basic pop-up flash can do magic if used well. See my post on how to use rear-sync flash if you're interested.
In any case, if you see the great light happening, grab your climbing buddy and get him on the nearest boulder or route. A lost shot is lost forever.

Don't cheat

You may find yourself tempted to tilt your camera a little in order to make the route appear steeper. Don't do it. It won't work, believe me ;-) There is always a little detail off and people will notice it, even if only subconsciously.

This side up

Shooting downwards, you usually have the choice which way to rotate the image. Rotate images and find out which direction has the most impact. (This can be tough to decide, good luck...)

Details

When going on a climbing trip, don't forget to catch the small things. There are so many details that, mixed in with some climbing action, can spice things up considerably. Think about the hands, belay gear, cams / rocks / quickdraws and all the other little things you can use for a nice shot.

Story

Try to tell a story with your shots. Usually the whole story doesn't have to be told by a single image. (Those images that do are the shots you find on the cover of National Geographic or similar big publications...)

Plan your shots and tell the whole story. Include shots of the whole crag / mountain / boulder, the climber as he's getting his gear together, buckling up, doing the route etc etc.

Experiment

Climbing is about freedom. The same is true for climbing photography. Go crazy! Go wide, go low, use fisheyes, multiple flashes... Remember: There are a million ways to shoot rock climbers. Go for whatever makes your palms sweat. (Thanks @Christian for the reminder!)

Steal

Look at other people's climbing shots. Work out what you like and try to emulate it. Everyone does it, that's how you learn!

Safety

Of course the most important aspect of all this is to keep others and yourself safe at all times. There are many books and websites on climbing safety, if you're unsure, check them out!
the gistbutt shots - don'twork on your timingthink faces, story, details, motionthink about lighthave fun and be safe!

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Whew, this was a long one. I'm sure I forgot a couple of essential aspects, so feel free to complain in the comments! I'd love to add anything I might have forgot to mention.

Link - Chase Jarvis Post: Your images are boring!

2009-06-23T18:13:00.003+02:00

Funny how things like this happen. Wrote down my ramblings on doing something crazy because all the safe shots are already made, and now I find that photographer guru Chase Jarvis published a post today covering roughly the same topic,too.. Go check it out if you'd like to read his (certainly) more eloquent and (probably) more profound view!

See you later!

Bruno

Big Picture - Why do I still shoot?

2009-06-23T13:42:00.005+02:00

Sometimes I find myself in a philosophical mood. Some of the thoughts floating around in my head in these occasions I'll be posting in this blog. I'll label them "Big Picture". Feel free to skip them if you're here just to look at the pictures or if you just want to learn things directly related with climbing photography. I won't be offended :-) I'd be happy to hear your thoughts, though!
So here goes, you have been warned! ;-)
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There are some 4 billion shots posted on Flickr with 4000 new images incoming every minute... Seeing these numbers I find myself wondering why I still bother picking up a camera...
Looking at the issue from this angle it seems unreasonable to keep on taking photos. Why should I work hard on becoming a better photographer when my photos drown in a steady stream of billions of other images anyway?
But let's not look at it that way! This isn't the end of photography. It is a chance to evolve. Stop playing it safe. Nikon won't send you free gear for taking safe shots. Don't be afraid to blow it. What have you got to lose? With so many shots around, all the pressure is off. All the obvious images are taken anyway, so you don't have to worry that the world may find itself without enough photos of sunsets, waterfalls or beautiful models. Realize that and stop being afraid. Don't feel pressured, feel free instead.

Take risks. Don't be afraid to blow it. Create something new. Something that hasn't been done to death a million times. You have a license to go crazy. Who says you can't do a portray with a fisheye?! Who says images have to be sharp? Who says blown-out highlights are evil?! Who says your images have to be loved by everyone?! What do you have to lose?!

No-one will notice if you stop making safe images. No-one will miss you. Stop bitching about it, it's your big chance! Stop playing it safe. Make mistakes, make 'em big and create something new.
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Lighting a climbing gym

2009-06-22T10:49:00.002+02:00

Someone pointed me to an older Strobist post on lighting a climbing gym. I'm not doing indoor shots often, but if you're interested, Dave has some cool ideas for this kind of situation! Check it out here.

Basics: Lens Choices

2009-06-22T08:19:00.010+02:00

For those getting started with DSLRs, the choice of "first" lenses can be overwhelming. (It was for me...) I'll try to give you a little advice based on the experiences with the gear I bought so far. As a rule, investing money in lenses is always better (and safer) than investing it in camera bodies. Cameras become obsolete faster than you can leave the store, while a good lens will last you years if not decades.

Reminder: Although I do talk about lenses, camera bodies and other tech stuff, always remember that these things don't make the pictures. Having nice equipment is fun, but you don't need it for making good images. I'm not a great photographer myself, yet the first of my images to get published in a couple of magazines was shot with a D40 and it's 18-55mm kit lens! You don't need expensive gear, but it's certainly fun... :-)

What lenses to buy first:
Wide or Tele? For bouldering I use an ultra wide-angle lens (10-20mm) most of the time. You'll usually be very close and the distortion of wide-angles (or even fisheyes) can bring dynamic to your climbing shots. I also use wide-angles often for sport climbing, providing I can get close enough. For the long shots, of course, having a tele zoom is nice, but if you're just starting out I'd consider a wide-angle more important. The 18mm found in the usual kit-lenses is a good starting point, but an upgrade to ultra-wide lenses like the Sigma 10-20mm is worth the money if your budget allows.

Very fast glass (f 2.8 lenses etc) is not that important in climbing photography (at least for an amateur like me) as in other sports because the light is usually good or you will be using flash when the sun goes down. Of course if you want to shoot inside climbing gyms you might want fast lenses...

If you're only shooting climbing, you could go a long way with just a cheap kit lens (18-55mm) and a ultra wide angle. For more flexibility in general photography you might consider an allround zoom like the popular 18-200mm lenses that many brands offer. (I own the Nikkor 18-200mm VR and it is fantastic!)
Depending on your interests, I'd consider going for the allround-zoom (should you want one) first, as it will give you more flexibility for general photography and 18mm is quite wide to begin with, anyway. Lens sharpness is talked to death, but let's be honest: you can get sharp images with any camera and any lens, period. If you want 100% razor sharp at 200% magnification when watched on a 30 inch cinema display you have my permission to buy something better.

Let me know if you'd like to know more!

See you later,

Bruno

Nothing to say

2009-06-19T15:21:00.013+02:00

Only heard the sad news just now...

Click here for more information of if you'd like to support their families.

left to right: Micah Dash, Jonny Copp, Wade Johnson

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Excerpt from adventurefilm.org:

The search began for three Boulder, Colorado climbers on June 3 after they missed their flight from Chengdu, China. The three had not been heard from since they left base camp on May 20, 2009. They were attempting a new route on Mount Edgar (6,618 meters/21,712 feet) in the Minya Konka area of China's Sichuan province.

On June 11, 2009, the bodies of climber Jonathan Copp (35) and videographer Wade Johnson (24) were removed from a broad gulley among avalanche debris on the southeast face of Mount Edgar. The body of the third missing climber, Micah Dash (32) was not located during the week-long search. Some of his equipment however, was located at the scene and he is believed to be dead according to the search team in China.

The bodies of Copp and Johnson were discovered after partial emergence from fresh avalanche debris. After days of effort, the searchers agreed that frequent rock fall and near-daily avalanches made further efforts extremely dangerous. The vast search area and deposition of new avalanche debris further diminished the probability of locating Dash's body.

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Read the full article here...

Creativity needs diversion

2009-06-19T08:33:00.010+02:00

I'm always fascinated by people who can be creative on demand. Professional artists can't afford to have that many bad days (as I had yesterday, glad I'm not a professional!). When they're on assignment, they have to deliver or they won't be hired again. Commercial photographer Chase Jarvis describes himself as a cultural junkie, subscribing to a huge amount of magazines, going to art galleries and taking a load of pictures every day with his iPhone to keep his creative juices flowing. Have a look at his iPhone portfolio, it's stunning!

So in the spirit of doing something new, I'd like to show you some pictures I took on a hiking trip with my girlfriend. She had a fantastic patience for the annoying guy following her around, holding a camera in his right and a flash in his left ;-) Thanks!

"When I see a man chasing a woman, holding a D90 in one hand and an SB-600 in the other, I shoot the guy. That's my policy!"

-Clint Eastwood

Let me know what you think! I'd love to hear your thoughts!

See you then!

Bruno

I suck...

2009-06-18T20:12:00.014+02:00

I suck! At least that's the way I feel right now ;-) There are days when you go on a shoot, all excited to take those pictures that will get you free gear from Nikon forever, and then you return with.... well... nothing. Well, not nothing, more like 200+ frames of the worst shots ever taken by a lifeform walking on two legs. Seriously, I got better shots when I dropped my camera last month, firing off a couple of frames by itself.

Paul doing cool moves while being let down by his photographer....

It's days like this that I get afraid I may have lost my mojo, talent or brains (did I ever have any of those?!). It's not that I didn't realize I was shooting crap. The worst thing was that I was fully conscious, burning through frame after frame, creating one catastrophic shot after another and not being able to do anything about it. And all the time hearing Joe McNally's voice in my ear, saying: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I present you a guy who has officially run out of ideas!"

Hats off to Paul for almost sticking this cool line, though!

In my head I know there'll be better days and better pictures again and maybe it's good to be reminded every so often, that you cannot force yourself to be creative. Maybe I should look at this as a wakeup-call to get some fresh ideas and try out something new...

So I think I'll browse through some great climbing shots by Corey Rich and try to get my mojo back. Feel free to come along, it's worth it!

In case you haven't heard of him yet, Corey is an accomplished climbing / outdoors photographer for Aurora Photo Agency. He's shot some of the greatest climbers in the world, including Chris Sharma, Tommy Caldwell and Beth Rodden. You can learn more by studying any one of his photos than by reading a dozen books, so check him out!

What do you do when you feel like I do today? Or don't you ever feel that way? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

See you then!

Bruno

Some thoughts on camera specs...

2009-06-17T09:16:00.001+02:00

Before buying my first SLR (Nikon D40) I read through a lot of websites, reviews and message boards and often found myself lost in all the specs that were compared. People would go on and on that the D40 didn't have an internal autofocus motor for older (non AF-S) lenses, that it didn't have a depth-of-field preview or no top LCD info screen etc. All that might be true, but the hard part is figuring out what features are important for you.

For climbing photography, here's what I think about some camera features that are often talked about:

Frames per second: One of the things I thought were way cool, until I found out that I seldomly burn away with 5 fps (except maybe when shooting snowboarders or surfers). The reason is simple: no matter how many shots you take, usually the only thing you look for is catching the subject in the one crucial moment. Shooting climbers, for example, this would be the moment where the climber dynos towards a hold and is just a half second away from reaching the hold. With 3, 5 or 10 fps this might work, of course. One of the shots might be the one shot. But there's a good chance that the moment happened right between #7 and #8...

On the other hand, if you start working on your skills as a shooter and practice hitting your shutter-release at just the right moment, the number of winner shots will drastically increase. This doesn't depend on your camera, you can do this just as well with a $250 D40 as with a D3 or 1D MK III.
Option to trigger external flash with pop-up flash: One of the features I value the most in my D90... moving the flash away from the subject-lens axis immediately improves the quality of light for your shots. Play around with it for a while and you will find out that the possibilties are endless (even without spending a fortune on equipment)!

Resolution: The D40's 6 MP would probably be enough for me, but I do love the 12MP of my D90. Usually, resolution is extremely overrated, but a step up from 6 to 12 is noticeable and gives you a little more flexibility for cropping. Let's be honest, I don't always get my framing absolutely perfect (especially when things are moving fast) and a little cropping never hurt anybody. Beware with point-and-shoot cameras, though, the smaller sensor size together with ridiculous MP counts (10, 12 and up) makes for worse image quality. Sticking with lower resolution / last year's cameras might save you money and get you better image quality! I'm not an expert on this stuff, if you think about buying a camera and need some sound advice, visit Ken Rockwell's site and have a look around. His style might not suit everyone, but I can only suggest to check for yourself! His articles might well have been the biggest influence on my choices of camera equipment and so far, I'm very happy with what I got.
Camera controls / Ergonomics: Ergonomics and software design are often overlooked but extremely important! One example: I always zoom in via the image preview (or is it review?! Well the in-camera thingy to look at the images you took) to check sharpness. With my old D40, when trying to scroll a zoomed-in image, it always took a second of depressing the scroll button to switch from a really slow scrolling to a faster one. The D90 on the other hand is much much faster. This might not seem like a big deal, but after a couple of thousand shots you notice stuff like this. I'm not kidding, I'd be willing to pay $100 alone for the faster scrolling! So, try out different cameras and see what camera works best for you.
Custom Menu Function (D90): A great option that I would miss greatly if I ever were to switch to another camera body. You can set the D90 to open a customizable menu via a button lying under your right middle finger. In this menu you can put all the things you're changing a thousand times a day during a shoot. It takes me no more than five seconds to switch Auto ISO on or off, change the ISO manually, set the pop-up flash into commander mode, dial in manual flash settings or switch between automatic and manual AF-focus point selection. You get used to this feature in about 10 minutes and will never want to live without it again! Write me in the comments if you'd like a detailed explanation of this.

Internal auto-focus motor: (Nikon D40/D60/D5000 specific); Nikon's least expensive cameras don't offer autofocus with older (non AF-S) lenses. At the time I bought my D40, I didn't care much about it as I didn't have older lenses anyway and didn't think that I might want to get one someday. But since Nikon offers some fantastic non AF-S lenses, most importantly the fabulous 50mm f 1.8 ($120!!!), this is a feature I consider extremely important. If you're absolutely sure you won't ever want to buy one of these lenses, no problem, but if you're not sure, think about getting a camera that offers this feature! It might save you money long term.
Sensor cleaning thingy: Another all time favourite on some camera tech discussions. I do have some minor dust problems now and then. (Do you think I wash my hands when switching from bouldering myself to taking photos?! Of course there's chalk on my hands and everywhere) So far, I'm not really impressed with the feature... I have it "clean" the sensor everytime I switch the camera off but I don't see any difference. The little spots I have now and then are taken care of by my trusty little dust-blower. No real problems so far. One of the features I wouldn't miss. (Never did on my D40)
Live-view: Leave me alone with live-view! I bought a DSLR to get away from this stupid looking posture of holding your camera away from your face, squinting to be able to see anything and waiting a year and a half to achieve focus. Sure, if you're doing macro shots of bugs on the ground, live view might come in handy. I only use live-view for the D90's movie mode.
Movie recording feature: The D90 was the first to offer this and I don't think there'll ever be a new dSLR being announced without it. I wouldn't buy a dSLR especially for shooting movies, but it is a nice feature to have. And judging from some clips done with the D90 or Canon 5d MKII, the results can be really great! Have a look at Chase Jarvis' website for some examples!
3, 11, 51 AF-Areas: Another feature that is found on the more expensive models is the increasing number of AF-Areas. (The spots in your viewfinder where the camera is checking focus) I went up from 3 points (D40) to 11 points (D90). For climbing shots, I use the center focus area 95% of the time. Focus, recompose and shoot - easy. I always feel a little uncertain when using the auto selection, as I'm never sure if the camera will agree with my idea of what is supposed to be in focus. I only use the Auto AF-Sensor selection when shooting blind, holding the camera over my head for example. For shooting surfers I love the 11 AF points, though! Things are moving so fast there and the distance of your subject is varying so wildly that I don't stand a chance to focus, recompose and shoot. In these case I simply put my camera on auto AF-selection and fire away. If I was shooting stuff like that all the time, I'd love to have the 51 points of the D300 or D700/D3.

These are the features that I thought about when choosing my gear. Let me know if you'd like my opinion on other features I might have forgot to mention! Feedback / different opinions are always welcome!

See you then!
Bruno

Gone Surfin' - Part II

2009-06-16T14:58:00.010+02:00

Just dropping in a couple more shots from a recent visit to Munich's famous surfing spot... (more climbing shots coming soon!)

Let me know what you think!

Have a good one!

Cheers

Bruno

How to make it in photography...

2009-06-15T18:44:00.008+02:00

I'm the last person to answer this question, and, don't worry, I won't.

Anyway, advertising and sports photographer Chase Jarvis wrote a great article about this a while ago on his blog. Have a look! Also check out his portfolio, it's amazing!

Short one for now, got some new stuff in the works, so hang on!

Take care,

Bruno

Gone surfin'

2009-06-06T11:36:00.001+02:00

As mentioned in the last post, I spent some time shooting surfers at a local spot in Munich last week. Having never shot surfers before in my life, I just started shooting a lot of frames trying to figure out what looks good.

With trees all around, only the wave itself was lit by direct sunlight while the background was in deep shade of the trees. This turned out great, as I could use higher shutterspeeds (1/800th and up) to freeze all the flying drops of water and seperate the surfer from the background. At 1/800th anything not lit directly by the sun falls off to black very quickly.

Here are some things that worked well for me:

shoot RAW. With all the water reflections, the camera had to pull some stunts to get the exposure right and I was glad I could tweak the highlights and shadows later in DxO Optics Pro
automatic AF-Area selection: the first time I was happy to have 11 AF - Areas! Even with all the water flying around, the D90 did an amazing job focussing fast and accurate.
Wait for the sun.
Keep your equipment dry ;-)

Next time, I'd like to get a little closer and maybe even use a wide angle... I just have to figure out how to keep my camera dry, wish me luck ;-)

Short update...

2009-06-04T21:33:00.000+02:00

Just a sample of some surfing shots I took yesterday. Full story coming soon, see you then!

RAW or JPEG

2009-05-26T19:56:00.006+02:00

The question of the "right" file format is often discussed with an intensity bordering on the religious. Personally I couldn't care less if someone had a different opinion about it than me, but many people can get really exited really fast when talking about the pros and cons of shooting raw. Here are some of my thoughts about whether to shoot in raw or jpg. Let me know what you think:

JPGs are nothing more than the raw sensor data (which would be the raw file) that has been processed by the camera into an image file. A raw file is not an image file, so you can't open it unless you have special software that can interpret raw data. Even with such a software, the image you see then is only an interpretation done by the software which you have to customize according to your taste. Also, "raw" is not a file format! Every camera brand has it's own raw file format. I shoot Nikon and they call their raw files ".nef".

After shooting jpg-only for the first year, I decided to start shooting both jpgs and raw. There are many different opinions out there and I found it very difficult to get any objective thoughts about this issue. Basically, raw gives you the chance to do the things the camera does when it's processing raws into jpgs internally. As far as I can see, that is both the big advantage and disadvantage of the raw format.
If you have the experience, software and time to process every single image yourself, you may get better results (meaning closer to your idea of the ideal result) with raw.

I looked at all the images I've taken during the last year and decided that, with the amount of post-processing I do on them, shooting raw is the way to go for me.

On the other hand, if you tend to do only minor post-processing (some contrast, crop, a little sharpness) you probably won't get that much more out of your photos with shooting raw. In fact, you might have to struggle to get even the same quality jpgs from raw files that your camera delivers automatically. One thing you might like with RAWs is the ability to fix exposure later. Getting good exposure can be tricky and some photos I ruined in my early tries by overexposing (my old D40 had a tendency to overexpose) could have been saved had I shot a raw file.

But remember: You do have to get quite comfortable with raw processing to get better results than your camera! When first opening my raw files (I use DxO Optics Pro), I get a low contrast, low saturation image that I have to work with quite a bit just to match the quality of the out-of-camera jpg. Once I spent some time optimizing it, the processed image does comes closer to my desired result than the out of camera jpg, but I have to work with it to get there! If you don't like spending that time (or if you are not someone with as much time on his hands as I am) you probably will be happier with sticking to jpgs.

What I do: If you do have really a lot of disk space available -and I mean A LOT-, shoot raw + jpgs (if your camera allows) and keep the option of working on the raw files for images you really care about! But beware, you will get silly amounts of data that you might never use! (With my D90, I can get some 900+ jpgs on a 2GB card, while I can barely get 120 RAW+JPG files on it!)

Another drawback of shooting raw files is the loss of speed when saving your images on the memory cards during continuous shooting. My D90 can shoot 4.5 frames per second for as long as I like when firing jpgs, while with raw files, the buffer fills up after about 10 shots and frame rate starts to drop rapidly! (I use SD extreme III cards)

Urban Crack Climbing - You can climb anywhere Part II

2009-05-21T15:08:00.000+02:00

You can climb anywhere.... a week after we checked out Wittelsbacher Bridge, Daxi told me about another location where he had found a crack that just might be climbable. We met a couple of days later and checked it out. Although a sewer pipe was dripping down on us directly above the crack, the crack itself and especially the location seemed fantastic. A huge graffiti was painted on the wall and the whole location made you feel like Blade Runner gone climbing.

We started working out possible solutions and quickly found out that the first three metres of the crack would be the hardest. Being too wide for fingerlocks and too narrow for jamming the hands, the first part is a slippery lay-back section with bad footholds. We worked our way up aid-climbing style, holding onto cams and nuts and hoping not to eat any badly placed cams shooting out of the crack... After this part, the crack becomes narrower allowing for good (but painful) fingerlocks, although you have to watch out not to rip off a finger in case you take a fall.

A week ago, Daxi did the first ascent, although with preplaced gear. We're definitely planning to visit again, the pure redpoint (gear placed during the attempt) is still open and I'd like to do the route as well...

Rear flash sync

2009-05-20T09:16:00.004+02:00

I think being able to let your flash fire at the end of the exposure is one of the biggest reasons to use an SLR instead of a point and shoot. With a decent mixture of available light exposure and a flash to freeze the last moment, even (usually ugly) direct flash can look good.

When bouldering in the winter months, the biggest problem is the fact that it gets dark about five minutes after it got light. When going bouldering with Toni during the week, we would arrive at the crag at about three o'clock (Toni is a teacher), warm up and switch on the flashlights at around three-thirty. Just perfect for a photographer...

During that time, I started experimenting with rear-sync flash a lot and got some shots I really like in the process. One problem with this syncing method is that exposures can get pretty long when shooting in dark conditions. The first shot had been a three second exposure while the second shot was fast at a third of a second. While this can get you interesting effects (light trails of the headlamps for example), it also increases the risk of getting absolutely nothing out of the shot. Once you press the shutter, your viewfinder goes dark and all you can do is try to follow the climber's movement, hoping everything turns out fine...

Leaving your camera in rear flash sync is a good practice (thanks to Joe McNally for the suggestion) as it doesn't have effect on faster shutter speeds but usually improves your shots at longer speeds. Effects tend to become visible from 1/30th and slower.

A nice visual effect can be to drag your camera during the exposure. When shooting a climber for example, you will have background blur due to the long exposure and camera movement, and a sharp subject because it's mainly lit by the flash. In the above shot, I started moving the camera downwards before pressing the shutter to get a smooth blur.

Tech stuff:

Shot #1

Nikon D40
ISO 200
Shutter speed: 3 seconds
f/4.0
exposure compensation -1/3 EV

Shot #2

Nikon D40
ISO 200
Shutter speed: 1/3rd
f/5.6
-1/3 EV

Shot #3

Nikon D90
ISO 200
1/20th
f/14
0 EV

You can climb anywhere

2009-05-20T08:39:00.000+02:00

Climbing at Wittelsbacher Bridge in my hometown of Munich, Germany. My friend Daxi told me about that bridge he had found, where, if the water was low enough, you could probably do some good climbing. We met the next day and checked it out. A solid looking railing on the top of the bridge made top-roping easy and soon we were checking out the possibilities. Under the curious eyes of businessmen and -women on their lunch breaks we monkeyed around at our new "crag" and had loads of fun...

about the shots

The first shot I took standing on a ledge to Daxi's left. Being also the belayer, I took in slack with my left hand while shooting with my right. I used my Sigma 10-20mm lens with my SB600 on camera for fill. (Off-camera would have been nice, but Daxi wasn't that keen on soloing...)

The second shot was pretty straightforward. On-camera flash (bounced from the ceiling I think) and shutter priority at something around 1/200th. Shot in RAW and tweaked until the highlights in the background suited my taste. I also slightly increased contrast with the curves tool in Gimp for both shots.

Tech-Stuff

Nikon D40
Sigma 10-20mm
SB600 flash
shot in RAW+JPG (small)
some post-processing in DxO Optics Pro and Gimp

Bokassa's Fridge / Assassin, Monkey and Man - fb 8c+

2009-05-20T08:00:00.000+02:00

Toni Lamprecht, once again. Spending two (or more) days a week bouldering with Toni for the best part of last year has been a fantastic experience. Apart from becoming a better boulderer myself, I also had the opportunity to become a more experienced photographer. Toni is a blessing for any photographer. He has virtually unlimited patience and never carries a bad facial expression while bouldering. (I myself tend to look a little retarded when climbing...) Also he knows that climbing photographers like to shoot faces, too, so he usually remembers not to bury his face in the rock and looks up for the camera instead.

The above shot was a first for me again, as it was the first shot I got paid for. Yay! After Toni did the first ascent of this 8c+ boulder, Toni forwarded me several inquiries for photos and so far, I got the above shot printed in Klettern and Panorama. It also got published on quite a few websites covering Toni's latest boulder, including Climbing.com, 8a.nu and The Low Down.

About the shot

I got the shot quite late in the afternoon as it was already getting dark. I held the SB600 to my low right and triggered it with the D90's internal flash. I'm not sure whether I shot shutter priority or program automatic.

Tech-Stuff

Nikon D90
Sigma 10-20mm
bare SB-600 off-camera triggered by the D90's pop-up flash
Raw+JPG (normal)

Luck

2009-05-20T07:01:00.000+02:00

Luck... I guess in any activity, if you are able to exactly recreate what you see in your minds's eye, you have come a long way in mastering that art. I haven't, of course, but sometimes luck helps you out to get that shot you dream about but have no idea how to take it.

We were bouldering at Atlantiswand in Kochel, Germany and a slight fog had been hanging in the small valley all day. All of a sudden the sun started bursting through and something in me screamed that this might turn out nice... ;-) I told my pal Philipp to try that boulder again and took about 5 shots. Nothing special, nothing planned. Just the pop-up flash to bring him up against the sun. The other shots all turned out not-too-special but this one I always liked.

Tech stuff:

Nikon D40
18-55mm kit lens
pop-up flash
shot in program automatic
shot in JPG

Welcome to my Blog!

2009-05-19T19:14:00.001+02:00

As a photographer my main subject is climbing photography. Being a climber myself, I constantly try to capture the feel of this sport and it's participants. On this blog, I will try to take you along with me as I progress in climbing as well as in photography. Although I'm by no means an experienced photographer I will try to offer ideas and tipps on climbing photography and photography in general. Some ideas may be good, some bad but where is the fun if you don't experiment?!

I'll start with a picture I made of the german climber Toni Lamprecht in his first ascent "Absoluter Kontrollverlust" - 9a / 5.14d at Atlantiswand in Kochel, Germany. This photo will always be quite special to me as it was the first shot I ever got printed in a real magazine... I somehow forgot to get paid for it, but frankly, I couldn't care less :-)

I took this shot a month after I got my very first camera (Nikon D40 w/ 18-55mm kit lens). Toni was working on some new hard project and I asked him if he minded me taking some shots of him in the new route. He kindly agreed and I did my first real climbing shoot... a couple of weeks later I got an email from the German climbing magazine Klettern asking me about a shot of Toni for their next issue. I got this shot into Climb! - Magazine and Klettern, although they weren't gigantic in size. Anyway I was more than happy how the whole thing turned out.

As for the photo, nothing special technically. Available light (apart from the pop-up flash the only available light for me at that time anyway) and me hanging about three feet above Toni... He very kindly told me a second later that he would need the holds I was standing on and I frantically jumared higher to make room ;-) For a fresh owner of a wide-angle (18mm) lens, it's amazing how much closer things are than they seem through the lens...

That's it for today, I hope you will find your way to this site again sometime, there's much more stuff waiting to be posted!

Ideas, suggestions and complaints are always appreciated! If you would like to read about a certain aspect of climbing photography, write me in the comments!

See you soon!

Bruno