Some time ago, I wrote a short piece on ways to improve your rock climbing photography. As promised there, here comes another article, of the same format, with ways to get better mountain climbing images. This is a much more difficult task, as you can't afford to focus on photography alone - you also need to climb the mountain! There are no silver bullets that will magically make your images stunning, but here is a short list of things you should probably be doing if you want the best results.

1. Keep your camera handy

If this article had been called "1 way to improve your mountain climbing photography", this point would still be there. This is by far the most crucial thing - if you put your camera in your backpack, you won't take pictures, period. It doesn't really matter which camera you are using, but make sure it is always stored outside of your pack, readily accessible, without having to take any gear/rope/pack on and off. The bag you are using will of course be the most important element, and my recommendation goes to a belt system, in particular the Thinktank skin (review coming up). The less hassle there is in taking a picture, the more and the better ones you will bring back home.

Read More

Rock climbing photography can be a surprisingly difficult domain. Though many climbers are also photo enthusiasts, it is all too easy to come back with a lot of butt pictures and photos of piles of choss.

Here then are ten ways you can start getting better images:

1. Use a better perspective

This is the single most important thing you can do. Shoot from above or shoot from the sides, but avoid shooting from below like the plague, as it's very rarely good or interesting.

The main reason you want to shoot from a different point of view (beside not wanting close-ups from the crotch of the climber) is so that you can show perspective and exposure. Climbing is a vertical activity which, with the right perspective, can be extremely impressive. This is your best weapon, make sure you use it fully!

This usually means ascending a fixed rope (make sure you know how to do this safely, and how to get down), though sometimes you can just scramble to a good place. Just keep safety in mind, as it's too easy to forget when a beautiful image presents itself.

Read More

Well, I was certain to get your full attention with this title, wasn't I! We are always looking for the magic bullet that will suddenly turn us into the lovechild of Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson and, when we find things to be a bit more complicated, we turn to our secret weapon: our wallet. Surely with the latest 2.8 zoom, or if we switch to a full frame camera, then our images will get better. Right?

Well, things don't quite work this way, and deep down, we all know the truth: there is no magic bullet. We can't buy our way into being a good photographer any more than we can buy our way into becoming a good writer. Talent might give you a head start, but in the end, the only way to become any good at creating images is, like for everything else, to practice it a lot. Nothing can replace hard work and shooting tens of thousands of frames, day in and day out. As brilliant as HCB, Adams, Weston and any of your photographic heroes might have been, they have worked very hard to become as good as they were, and they shot a lot of crap to get there, just as everybody else.

At this point, you might simply shrug, thinking that there is nothing new here and you would be right to find the title of this post misleading. Indeed, just accepting the reality and saying "I need to work hard" is great, but it isn't of very concrete help.

But I didn't lie: there is a thing, simple and relatively easy, that you can start doing right now and that is guaranteed to make you a much better photographer than any amount of money you could spend on gear or even workshops. I was lucky enough to discover it by chance when I started getting serious about photography, and I have no doubt that it was the main factor in making me reach where I am today (wherever that is).

Read More

A few days ago, the results of the UK Landscape Photographer of the Year Award were announced. BBC News made an announcement on their website, and a very interesting thing happened. Most of the readers comments were not praising the winning images but complaining about one thing: they looked like "HDR". By that, they meant overly contrasted and saturated images that appear unrealistic (on a sidenote, I am fairly sure that only one of the eight winning photos actually was HDR).

The technique has indeed a very bad press, especially in the "fine art" community, and to be fair, much of the criticism is justified. But the point I would like to make here is that, well used, it can be very powerful and look perfectly natural, and is sometimes the only way to capture a scene as our eyes see it. Because there are so many widespread misconceptions about HDR, and because most online resources focus on how to achieve this overcooked effect that so many of us hate, I would like to briefly make myself its advocate. Do not expect a detailed tutorial but rather a general presentation of the technique.

Read More

If you find this article useful, you will probably be also interested in my book on the subject, Remote Exposure.

In my (very biased) opinion, mountains are the most beautiful environment on the planet, and certainly a very important source of great photography. But besides their intrinsic beauty, those big stacks of rock have another attribute that makes them of special interest to imagemakers: they are inaccessible. Or rather, very difficult to access, requiring special knowledge, equipment, and physical abilities. Which means that the perspective from mountains is likely to be very unique, only having ever been seen by a very select few. Beauty and originality, the dreams of any photographer, come (almost) for free in climbing. It is no wonder, then, that most of the climbers I know have a deep interest in photography.

Read More