It’s a simple question: can you creatively photograph a climbing gym?

One of the local climbing gyms in the area (Salt Lake Bouldering Project) has beautiful dark blue walls peppered with colorful holds. Their grading scale is a set of colors, each denoting the difficulty of each boulder problem. So much color! Color everywhere!

I had a question floating around in my head for a while: could you emphasize these colors/color scheme with lighting? I’d worked with lighting in the studio, but not in a large, open space like a climbing gym. 

EQUIPMENT:

My experience using the immensely powerful and beautiful Aputure 600x was my starting place. If you turned off all the overhead lights in the building, and using the 600x as your key light source, how could you then uniquely fill the rest of the image with controllable light? I turned to the super fun LiGhT SaBeRrrrrRR!! AKA, the Astera Titan Tubes. With simple controls, LED, and light (pun intended), they were the easy go-to.

Soooo.. LET’S DO THIS!

COMPOSITION:

I took the 600x and turned it to a lavender/purple. It complemented the blue quite nicely, and allowed for room for extra fun colors by the light sabers. As you can see below, there’s a constant purple, mixed in with teals, greens, and even yellows.

Now.. for the fun part..

The Apsera’s have a rainbow setting. I had some volunteers who were super eager to test out the potential for moving light. They weaved in and out of the main subjects, and even threw in some patterns. What we got was absolutely amazing.

The trickiest part of the whole thing was trying to keep the ground steady. As we were in a bouldering gym, the ground is soft padding. I stood my camera and tripod on a wood platform, hoping it would help a little. I even had to put on a longer lens so I could be further away from the movement. It’s a fun practice in practice.

TRICKS:

So what one must understand with light, is that it’s waves, not pigment. So if I shone red, green, and blues light on you from various angles, you would essentially be illuminated with white light. Your shadow, however, would be split into each of the colors, after they’ve converged on you and then split. So. If you have your rainbow light saber and go to shine it on your subject, while also having a key light with some other color constant, your not going to fully get the rainbow effect on them because those light waves are going to intersect on your subject and ‘combine’ to form more of the complete light spectrum than solely their own wave color pattern. Does that make sense.. Maybe I should make a video that explains this..

So in order to show just the rainbow, and not get any interference that could mute any of the colors, I turned all the continuous lights off, and on a black Arc’teryx jacket (because they were sponsoring the lights/action/climb event we came up with. Thanks Arc’teryx!!), and because black absorbs light (which is why we don’t wear black on hot, sunny days), it worked quite well, and you could see the full spectrum of light.

THE FORWARD:

So Bouldering Project, with my idea for a night of colored climbing, created an event for their member-appreciation-month and it was quite a hit. I also photographed this, and Salt Lake came out in troves to climb in the dark. It was a hit!!

It was that time, when the weather in your town is totally normal for December, and you’re looking for ways to suffer.

Wait.

Huh. 

Oh just me. Ok. Well anyway..

The FrEeZeFeSt. 

-Noun, where a group of hooligans between the ages of 7-mentally 7 get together and bring in the new year with the best kind of festivity possible: canyoneering.

Southern Utah got socked in with snow, so why enjoy the northern skiing when I could enjoy the suffer of snowineering? Great question. South it is.

Waking up is a struggle. Getting into bed is a struggle. Drinking water is a struggle. Feeling your toes is a struggle. Some pals setup a cooking tent with space heaters, others cooked in their souped-up trailers, others in the windy.. barren.. cold.. I’m not complaining. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. This is fine.

I ran around the fire my first night, anxious to hear how everything had been, conditions, life updates, canyon plans. The leprechauns had been thrown around as mild options. Perfect.

Tom Jones barely seeing past his own breath

My goal was to get to 100 canyons by the end of the year, so linkups were the plan. Northwash has a variety of linkups that go, yet the amount of ice that formed on upclimbs, and snow and potentially melted snow had me second-guessing my proposed amount of volume within each day.

Chris wallows in the white stuff..

The Leps were wonderful, with West being my favorite.

Sometimes freezefest is about hanging out. Other years it’s about really getting after it. This year was more the former, as few wanted to get snowed out of canyons, and even fewer wanted to get wet, so the options were few and far between.

Tom Jones and I bailed out of the East fork early as water was to be expected. Phew. The next day, a huge group of us did the Shillelaghs and Tom and I did the second one just the two of us. Thanks Tom!

Tom Jones. His  face says it all.

We stemmed through cinnamon-sugar snow (snow+sand) and kept warm on the rappels. I could finally feel my feet by the end of the day. Back to camp to replenish and chillax. Oh Northwash. What short trip, and only had me itching for more. 

Famed for a movie named after hours spent in suffering. A location you’d stumble upon only if lost. A canyoneer’s home for a solid weekend. Robbers Roost. 

Why the ominous title? Some history according to le wiki: The hideout was considered ideal because of the rough terrain. It was easily defended, difficult to navigate into without detection, and excellent when the gang needed a month or longer to rest and lie low following a robbery. It was while hiding out at Robbers Roost that Elzy Lay and Butch Cassidy first formed the Wild Bunch gang. The Wild Bunch gang, early on led by Cassidy and his closest friend Elzy Lay, developed contacts inside Utah that gave them easy access to supplies of fresh horses and beef, most notably the ranch owned by outlaw sisters. The gang constructed cabins inside Robbers Roost to help shield them from the harsh winters. There, they stored weapons, horses, chickens, and cattle.

Okokok so fast forward from the 1890s to the 2019s and you’ll find an equally vibrant and eclectic band of hooligans up to no good.. 

Day 1: reports of dry canyons had the photographers itching to check out one of the more gorgeous canyons in the area. You want tight corridors, swirly sandstone, AND beautiful reflected light? Done

What about stemming? Oh ya.. 

Arches in canyons? It happens. Do you know the difference between an arch and a bridge? According to the Natural Bridge and Arch Society (yes yes you read that correctly..) “a natural bridge is distinguished from other types of natural arches by having one or more of the following attributes: a current of water, such as a stream, clearly was a major agent in the formation of the opening.” So, an arch formed via water is a bridge. Ok. Enough science. 

I was able to practice my 3 main concepts of canyoneering photography: leading lines, layers, and light. Photographing while leaning to the side, crouching down to capture the ground as a foreground, and taking advantage of reflected light, or the soft glow that’s sources from farther up or down-canyon.

And then.. POOF! Canyoneers appear from the sky!

A hike out and halloween fest were in order

Next day was more technically challenging. No bolts for anchors? Ghost it! Use rocks! Sticks! Go! 

It can get a little hectic: the organization, the yard sale of gear that occurs at most rappels where anchors need rebuilding, the sequencing of human bodies in tight spaces, the coordination of gear that these humans possess. It makes me so happy. Sometimes it’s a well-oiled machine and everyone knows their place/strength and other times it’s a mad dash and intense combination of opinions and techniques. Either way, it’s a joy, because it’s all within the watchful walls of ancient dunes and seabeds that we now explore.