Pennine Lines w/c 30 September 2024
|| Drying off slowly || Still a way to go ||
Mecca, Raven Tor || Climber: Christoph Hanke
|| Focus On... ||
Slow = Good
As a climbing photographer (as opposed to a photographer who climbs) I’m constantly juggling the two pursuits; they complement each other well but they also conflict at times - at any given moment at the crag do I climb, or watch someone else climb through the lens? Even somewhere as convenient as Raven Tor, on a dull day, I feel the pressure to decide. Worse still if it’s good weather; is it the climbing gear that gets thrown into the car boot, on a golden gritstone evening, or the camera bag and tripod? There’s often a hard choice to be made, as attempts to spread myself too thinly rarely work out. As I am often told; blokes can't multitask.
However, there’s actually a surprising number of parallels between photography and climbing which I keep coming back to again and again. For one, both pursuits are avenues of exploration where you really need to put the hours in and find a way to keep the fires lit, to keep turning up week in week out, year after year. For most of us that’s how you get good at something. And even for those ultra-strong youths tearing it up at a young age, they will still be become better climbers with time. The old Malcolm Gladwell theory says that it takes 10,000 hours of doing something to reach expert level, and there seems to be a lot of truth in that. Yet both photography and climbing now have entire industries mobilised around each one to sell you quick wins, extraneous gear, shortcuts, gimmicks, AI or whatever else appears at the frontiers of commercialism on any given week. Navigating this minefield is tricky in either discipline - both can be a wallet (and soul) emptying experience if you’re not careful.
You might be thinking 10,000 hours sounds like a long time, but that can seem to pass in a blink of an eye if shooting film. Aside from actually shooting the images, there’s developing to be completed, scanning to be done, editing to be done, the hard drive and the filing cabinet now slightly closer to bursting point - and that’s without going down the route of the time-vacuum that is darkroom printing. You might reasonably view this as a complete pain in the backside, but one thing this does give you is a little space; some distance from the immediate act of making the image. To steal a line from elsewhere…“maybe I like the misery”. Once you see the images finalised the rush of immediacy has long since passed, hence you get to live with images before you decide to unleash any on the rest of the world, which I know might be a bit of a culture shock these days. Fast is not necessarily best, and not everything needs to be on Instagram by last orders. I don’t like to make these emails really photographer-y (that isn’t a word, I know), but if there’s one thing digital photographers can learn from film it’s that its fine to sit on images, it’s fine to live with an image for a while. How you feel about an image now isn’t the same as how you’re going to feel about it in a few weeks or months. A bit of time to reflect isn’t a bad thing.
Autumn colour at the fringes of the Peak (click to order print) || Lady Canning's Plantation
Another similarity between climbing and photography is both have an engrained culture of widespread and frequent travel. I’ll leave the rant about gratuitous use of air travel for now, but aside from the environmental impact there’s a big difference between being the tourist, flitting in and out, compared to building up a relationship with a place. Dropping in and grabbing the obvious photo that everyone gets, or the same boulder problem all visitors do, then moving on. I’m not saying experiencing new places is a bad thing, we all love the excitement of somewhere new or climbing a time-honoured classic, but there’s a balance to be struck. All too often constant novelty and consumption of ticks and the acquisitional nature of logbooks (churning out Instagrammable content - a consumption-based approach to climbing or photography) often sidelines the ‘other’ path of really getting to know somewhere well, spending time there in all seasons and finding a sense of place. Once again there's value in taking the slow approach.
This is actually potentially one of the strengths of climbing in particular - alongside photography, which is often overlooked. Once the pads are down under the project, or once the clips are in, or the tripod is up waiting for some fleeting light, you’ve got time to look around, hear the sounds, watch the weather pass, see the light change, feel the breeze blowing. You don’t necessarily get this with all outdoor pursuits, as you’re often moving from place to place. I can think of a few where you don’t, but the more mainstream stuff like walking, running, mountain biking, skiing you tend to be on the move. Again, this is not ‘wrong’, and as someone who’s climbed at Sean’s Roof recently I concede that not all places reward efforts to sit and quietly contemplate, but often climbing can give you space to find a subtley different way of experiencing a place.
Anyway, in the spirit of getting to know the landscape well, in all seasons, I’ll be producing a Peak District calendar this year. I’ve not done a calendar for a few years, and this one will be images from the eastern gritstone edges and a little bit of the central limestone too - basically my stomping grounds, the places I know best of all. I will keep the exact selection of images under wraps until they drop, but it will be entirely 5x4” colour film-based images of the Peak District landscape in all seasons, all developed and scanned by me in-house, and entirely images which are not as yet on sale as prints in the Print Shop.
Tools of the trade || Chamonix view camera
One of the issues when producing calendars, is making it work financially. By that I mean being able to offer a quality product at a price that you the customer is willing to pay, with sufficient margins to make it worth doing. And crucially doing it without ending up with a load of stock which rapidly haemorrhages value once 1st January rolls around, regardless of how nice the photos are. Now, there’s any number of fairly anonymous Peak District calendars out there; the tourist shops of the Peak are full of ‘em. Often filled with the same images that’ll adorn place mats and mugs in the same shops, stacked high and flogged cheap to an undiscerning and transient customer base. I’m not knocking it, but it’s never been the route I’ve wanted to take. And I know anyone signing up for these emails with an interest and emotional investment in the crags and landscape of the Pennines deserves something with a bit of gravitas that’s worth supporting - and it’s the support of you buying prints, buying calendars and books that keeps this all going. So, this won’t be the cheapest Peak calendar you’ll find, but it’ll be worth the coin. Expect 200gsm paper, A3 size, wire bound in 400gsm covers. It won’t be pint-of-beer cheap, but it won’t be Lattice Yoga Mat money either. Somewhere in the middle.
It’ll be available on a pre-order only basis from mid-October, with a deadline for orders in late November, for shipping out in the first couple of weeks of December. So watch this space - hopefully a handy side benefit is the calendar will solve your Christmas present problems for all your hard-to-buy-for baby-boomer relatives who have got everything they actually need already. You’re welcome.
|| Recently Through The Lens ||
A taster of the winter sunrises to come in the Hope Valley
|| Fresh Prints ||
Fingers crossed for some good photo conditions this winter - last year a couple of mornings on Curbar spring to mind as being some of the best conditions, albeit VERY cold - check out some of the fruits of those labours in the Print Shop.
