Climbing 'fast and light'
Jonathan Griffith is addicted to mountains. He is a climber who not only records his expeditions with his camera, but also runs a website for keen like minded photographers to share their work and offer advice for anyone wanting to take to the slopes with a camera.
Jonathan has kindly outlined his approach and talks about how he manages to take such dramatic pictures whilst clinging to the rock face. He told me:
"In this modern era of Alpine climbing the new generation is all about 'fast and light' ethic. Forget Bonnington, this is all about shedding every gram so that instead of spending say three days on a route you spend one massive one. It involves taking the absolute bare minimum with you - two litres of water, some energy gels, a super light down jacket and some spare gloves. That's it.
"Backpack size is less than what most people cycle to work with on their back. Of course this means that the commitment is huge as once you start up these big north faces retreat is often impossible, and when you are going this light you cannot stop for the night as you don't have any sleeping bags and so on. You have to keep climbing through until you make it back down the other side of the mountain.
"The climbing style is very 'out there' for the moment. It's incredible how you can throw yourself onto a huge dark north face with such little kit with you. Training plays a massive part as well and it all comes together on these big mountain days when you can often find yourself climbing for over 20 hours non stop.
"On a recent climb we hadn't eaten anything apart from three chocolate bars for over 36 hours. However we still climbed the route in an incredibly fast time. It often takes two days to climb and descend the mountain by our route (it's a very serious undertaking though) but we did it in 21 hours.
"So my SLR kit weighs in at 1.8kg, which is almost two litres of water in weight. As you can see carrying an SLR on a route in this style is a lot of extra weight and therefore commitment. In addition we tend to solo on these big routes so that we can move as fast as possible, which means getting the camera out is even harder to do. However I'm addicted to mountain photography. I love getting shots that no one else has ever taken before - I really get a buzz out of it.
"No one has yet climbed all these hard classic routes with a DSLR in tow. I tried a high end compact briefly for the weight saving but stopped after two climbs as the quality is rubbish compared to the SLR. I like everything to be pin sharp and perfect. I don't do HDR () or any of that PS (PhotoShop) stuff, as I don't think you have to if you put the effort in the first place.
"I guess I'm trying to push the boundaries of mountain photography in a major way and I'm surprised that no one else has thought to do the same. There are so many climbs and mountains in the European Alps that have yet to be photographed due to the logistics, and the fact that you have to be climbing at the top end level, so this is what I am aiming to do."
Do you feel that the work goes beyond a simple record of a climb?
"I'm no artist. I don't take images and try and find some deeper meaning in them. I think that kind of attitude is reserved for people who aren't actually very good at photography. People who take a close up of a snow flake and try and sell it off as art, saying that it represents the shattered fragments of our society or some rubbish like that make me a bit angry."Good photography should never have to be explained, it should speak for itself, and if you have to justify it and pass it off as 'art' it means you've done a rubbish job, that's just my view.
"So I don't try and say that my pictures represent a deeper struggle in man or anything like that, they just show climbers pushing themselves to a limit that 99.9% of people will never even be able to imagine.
"It's a limit not only of the body but also of the mind. Alpine climbing is incredibly mental as well. You have to be very calculated when you climb and have the mental strength to often do things that you didn't think were possible."
What came first, the climbing or the photography?
"Well the climbing. I never trained in photography. I actually have a degree in Economics, Accounting and Spanish so nothing to do with what I do now. I started climbing and then started climbing in the Alps. No one I knew was into climbing at all so photography was a way of being able to show friends and family what it was like."It progressed from there really but I've always carried an SLR with me almost from day one. I didn't know how to use it then, but I knew that it was the only way to really capture the beauty of the mountains in any detail."
And what about your website for like minded photographers?
"I set up Alpine Exposures as a community idea website. I just wanted a really cool site that exhibited a lot of amazing climbing shots from around the world and not just my own. It's going well but I think Alpine Exposures and Jonathan Griffith as names are kind of synonymous in the climbing world now. The site gets about 400 unique visits a day on average, so it's not massive to be honest, but I also write and send pictures to a number of other climbing websites."
What's next?
Well I'm planning a trip to Patagonia in November.
You can see more of Jonathan's work in this gallery on the ´óÏó´«Ã½, or on .
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