What is climbing photography ?

* Taking pictures of climbers from the ground ?
* Taking pictures of a boulderer with his butt on the ground ?
* Taking pictures while climbing ?
* Doing a climb with the specific intent of photographing it ?
* Doing scenic photography of mountains and including some famous routes in the shot ?
* Doing pictures for a guidebook ?
* Documenting an expedition ?


[ToclaFace.jpg] A picture taken by a friend showing me nearing the summit of Toclaraju, Peru. I'm visible as little more than a black fleck, even on the highest resolution scan.

Left: A picture taken by a friend showing me nearing the summit of Toclaraju, Peru. I'm visible as little more than a black fleck, even on the highest resolution scan.

There are different ways to do climbing photography, depending on where you are climbing and what you want to show. For instance, take mountain climbing: basically you take pictures while you are climbing. If you take only a close up of your partner, it's not too interesting in itself so you need to include some background to show how high up you are, what kind of climbing your are doing... So it's actually closer to scenic photography, except that you want to convey that you are in the picture (or the back of it), living an adventure and not just taking a picture of some mountain from the road. It's enough to get the camera out every once in a while and take a shot and anyway you can't move away to show the general view. Back home you can sort out the 3 basic kinds of pictures that come out of such a trip: climber close up, pure landscape and climber(s) included in scenery. It's quite important to vary those 3 types of shots if you are doing the slide show of an expedition for instance: no one wants to see 100 pictures of mountains in succession, even if they are all perfect.

On the other hand, take rock climbing photography: you want to show the difficulty, the movement, the strength of the climber, but you are not particularly interested in the rock itself. For this you need to act more like a real photographer: you have a subject and need to show it in a certain way, you are not part of it, it's his climb not yours (even if you did climb it just before). You need to be a better photographer for this than for mountain climbing photography; it's sometimes more like a studio: making sure the light is right (climbers always have their face in the dark against the rock), finding the proper angle (left for this move, right for the next one maybe, from the top with the head up, from the bottom with the legs spread out), managing facial expressions, etc...