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!!