Last year I did a shoot for Wild Country , they were bringing out a new range of clothes specifically with the climber in mind , sort of urban/street/bouldering wear , they look really cool , I have to say I virtually live in my climbing jeans , good for cragging , bouldering , multi pitching and wearing down the pub.
The brief for the shoot was to create a slight fashion shoot feel to the images, not your standard climbing shots . I was using the Elinchrom quadra system as my main light and a 580 EXii speed light to add definition at the edges and as a hair light . I try and keep my lighting as simple as possible and shoot in manual most of the time , controlling my ambient with shutter speed and the amount of flash hitting the sensor with my aperture. Using the S head quadra means I can hyper sync my PWTT5 to shoot above my normal sync speed of 1/250 so can essentially shoot up to 1/1000s , or a bit higher but i rarely would need to do that .
The first half of the day was spent at the climbing wall as the weather was a bit grim , then after lunch headed up to the plantation to get some crag shots . I was particularly happy with the portrait type shots as they have a bit of typical english moodiness in the weather , not your alpine blue skies which we rarely see in the UK.
The climbers were some of the countries best and they all cruised some pretty hard boulder problems in double quick time and didn’t complain standing in bare feet in the cold and changing T shirts to get all the various clothing combinations covered .
Thanks to the team for some hard climbing and generally having a good laugh with it and not complaining .
