Climber Magazine

ANALOGUE
I was recently invited to give a talk at the fi rst Exposure Photography
Festival in Sheffi eld. This new festival featured insightful workshops and an evening of talks from photographers celebrating climbing photography.
It was a wonderful evening (keep an eye out for it next year) –
someone even called me the ‘elder statesman’ of climbing photography
which I took as a compliment and not that I’m over the hill as there’s
still plenty more to come, but I digress. What did come across was the
enthusiasm of a like-minded audience eager to listen and ask questions to understand the ‘art’ and pick up tips from working photographers.
Maybe the ‘elder statesman’ moniker came from having been in the
climbing photography game for over three decades and capturing someiconic images on the way. I initially honed my skills with fi lm or ‘analogue’ photography rather than the ‘digital’ photography that most started within recent years. It was a different ball game with fi lm, you needed tounderstand light and how fi lm reacted in various scenarios, carry large(weighty) fast aperture lenses capable of gathering as much light aspossible to get a shutter speed high enough to freeze any movement – we were shooting on 50 and 100 ISO rated fi lm for the best results with very little leeway if you got the exposure wrong.
To cap it all you only had 36 shots per fi lm and you couldn’t look at the
back of the camera to see if you had cracked the exposure or got ‘the shot’.
That required waiting to get the film back from the photographic lab and the jeopardy of not knowing if you had nailed it. The buzz you got when you placed the processed slides on a lightbox and saw the images pop back at you and you had nailed it was incredible.
But things move on, I loved my film ‘apprenticeship’ but I’m a realist
and fully embrace digital.
Until next time, be safe.
David