Improving your climbing photography – 12 week mini course – week1

Looking for top tips to improve your climbing photography? In this weekly series, I offer 12 practical ideas for you to play with to take your climbing pic’s up a notch.

Good climbing photographs are generally the result of experience, skill and predetermined conscious effort. They are rarely quick snapshots taken hastily by the belayer.

These ‘snapshots’ are easy to spot; headless climbers, missing limbs, and butt shots. Great images don’t happen by chance.

The good news is that there’s a bunch of easy stuff you can do to make big improvements to your climbing pictures. Over the coming weeks I’ll give you tips that you can utilise one by one, or just pick the ones you fancy (like Pick’N'Mix).

The bad news is that you will need to put in some effort, so let’s start off with the tip that I still find the hardest to swallow…

1: Decide whether you want to climb or take photographs

If you’re climbing and taking climbing photos you’ll only ever get 1 of 2 outcomes…

• Butt shots or the tops of heads/helmets
• Snapshots and self portraits (I love these by the way and you should definitely take same of these too!)

Trying to climb and photograph just doesn’t work. It’s a bind, but it’s something you simply have to accept. If you’re trying to take better climbing shots you can’t be climb at the same time.

There’s a practical side to this argument – trying to climb and take photographs results in having to carry a huge amount of kit; more ropes, more protection, jugging gear and all your camera kit!

Now, having swallowed that rather bitter pill, do you still want to improve your climbing photography? Great! The good news is that’s the hardest part over with!

Watch out next week for part 2: Know your camera controls