The Distant Future: The Year 2010

Things are a happenin' and I'm very pysched! Many opportunities to make pictures are in the near future and ideas are brewin'. Next year is starting to look so fun as I think about what I want to be working on. In recent months I have been fighting a complete and utter shut down of creativity. I had just been climbing a lot and training and primarily focusing on that. Now of course, I hadn't completely stopped shooting. I will always shoot, I just hadn't been shooting as much as say a year and a half ago.

Now though, things are starting to pick up. Ideas are starting to weave there way into my thoughts and I am constantly thinking about and creating images in my head. Now it's time to start turning those idea's into tangible items.

I have a few stop motion/time lapse projects in mind as well as new portraiture. I have been shooting climbing so much that I currently have little to no new portrait stuff. But this will be changing.

What has been happening though is exposure. I have been creating a pretty good web appearance with a Featured Gallery
on Climbing.com.

I also graced the "featured Content" box on the home page for a few days. I'm really excited about this! Before this gallery, my site's visitor average was around 90 hits per day, sometimes dipping as low 25 hits per day. 2 days after climbing.com published the galley, it shot up to just under 12,000 hits! In a day! I'm so psyched on how many people visited the site. Very cool.




I'm also proud to announce that I have been working with Avid Climbing
and their BRAND NEW site. It's looking good and I'm REALLY psyched to be working with these guys. They make some really great t-shirts that come in great colors PERFECT for photographing. Stay tuned to them for some awesome new clothes soon.

Avid used two of my images, both are brand new and haven't been scene anywhere else and still can't be for now. The first is of Eric Sanchez on the sick Yosemite classic The Force (V9) and the other is Eric on Athlete's Die Young (V5 (sandbag)).

For the first image I had two strobes on both ends of the boulders' face pointing in at Eric climbing. I had the left strobe at a little higher power than the right because it was going to be farther away from the wall and I wanted to create the key from that side and fill Eric in with the right.



For the second image I used a classic lighting set-up for portraits. Highlight on the side with fill coming in from the frontish. This problem works up a ships prow on crimps to a MASSIVE dyno to a good edge. Since he was climbing an arete I knew that I had two faces to work with. So I placed the left strobe behind a tree essentially pointing back at the camera. I had this on a higher power then the right thus creating a SICK highlight on Eric seperating him from the background; lighting the left side of the arete creating depth and also backlighting the Oak tree AND illuminating the chalk still floating in the air. The right strobe filled in everything from the front and pointing a bit left directly at Eric.

When we shot this image it was dark. Like we should of had headlamps but stupid us left them in the car dark. And I didn't just want this big boulder light and dark abyss surrounding. So I set the camera up on a tri-pod on a fat flat rock. Dropped the shutter WAY down 1/15 of a second and used that slow speed to fill in the background. It ended up creating this very painted looking forest of blue that swirls around Eric swinging out on the dyno.


If you have any further questions about how I shot these images please leave them in the comments and I will get back to you ASAP. Also, if you have any questions about any other image send me an email and I will see what I can do to help!

I would also like to share with you an awesome video short created by my good friend and great writer Lauren Barnard. She has tackled two birds with one stone by creating a video for a Mass Comm. class of her working on an art project. Simply, it's a quick, easy and fun video done for a class assignment. But deeper its an awesome multi-media package that incorporates modern technology with age old art. I really like the idea and it goes right along with the kind of stuff I have been seeking out to watch for visual inspiration to help spark my creativity. So please enjoy as I have!



Thank you for stopping by and Climb On!

-AGR