Bernard, nice photography, but I think all that cold weather stuff has upset your priorities: a good-looking partner makes you want to LEAVE the tent? Perhaps a price too far...

Rob C

Rob,

Good point, I knew there was still something wrong with that final draft.

Cheers,
Bernard

Maybe the good-looking partner already got out of the tent (that's not very unusual in my experience)!?

I still think the hoarfrosted gendarme in Akadake is one of the most outstanding examples of mountain photography I've seen and my opinion hasn't changed since seeing it in Flickr gallery almost a year ago. It has a very powerful feeling, real atmosphere.

Cheers,
J

"Maybe the good-looking partner already got out of the tent,"

What is this, you some paparazzo-type lensman? That´s the trouble with menus: you take your eye off the birdie and whooosh - it might or might not be gone!

Keep the tent well zipped and there ain´t no draught, Bernard. On the other hand, maybe that´s where we came in? Or why we left?

Rob C

No paparazzi.
The problem is that unless you are on a technical climbing route and sleeping attached to the mountain wall and to your partner with a rope and a climbing harness, you can't be sure if your good-looking partner wakes up earlier and unzips that tent... whifff and she's out and you better eat that instant-coffee and start running!
No paparaffi...

That's indeed a concern... but I guess that landscape photographers typically just don't have good looking partners in the first place... this was a very theoretical point...

Cheers,
Bernard

p.s.: I hope that I am not hurting anybody's feelings here...

Maybe that's why they got into landscape photography in the first place
On the other hand, in case having a good-looking parter, maybe she's out of the tent so fast because I'm not good-looking... Damn, this gets complicated. Better to concentrate on those landscapes anyway.

Cheers,
J

Excellent article and images.

All I can say is where what this a few months ago BEFORE I climbed up Kilimanjaro??



I whole heartedly agree with your comment about forgetting basic technique when you are exhausted. Fortunately I don't know that much, so there wasn't too much to forget!



Cheers

I don't even need exhaustion as an excuse. After some 40-odd (sometimes very odd) years shooting view cameras and SLRs, when I added an RF camera to my collection (Mamiya 6), there were several times when I brought back rolls of film in which the first two or three frames were blank.

I simply forgot to remove the lens cap (DOH!!!, as Homer Simpson would say.)

Bernard's essay and pictures are great!

Rangefinder isse, right... I keep doing the same when using a 120 film adapter on my 4x5, I forget to remove the sliding metallic shade in about 10% of my images...

Cheers,
Bernard

Well, I have to apologize here, because the article has been hanging around in a corner of my hard-disk for almost a year...

Cheers,
Bernard

Great article Bernard, and just in time for winter and a whole new set of challenges. Very well thought out and helpful.

I would have appreciated if you covered some of the winter specific, technical, aspects. Lens condensation, extreme cold, water proofing and so on.

I am also curious about how you pack your your camera on extended alpine climbs. I'm trying to save weight by just throwing everything into the top of my pack, but this affords very little protection. The camera and lenses are always jostled by the rock/ice gear. Have you found a way to protect the equipment while retaining mobility, or do you always have to compromise.


Phillip Dobson

Hi Philip,

Thanks for the kind words. Yep, it would indeed have been interesting to touch on that as well. Will think of it for v2.



What I normally do is to keep the camera and lenses in the upper section of my Osprey packs as well.

I have settled with this approach when I started to shoot 4x5 3 years ago. I realized that I was unable to take interesting images on the fly. I personnally need time to scout a scene, set up a tripod and try different things. The partical consequence is that I need to drop my pack anyway. From then on, having to open it to take the camera out becomes less of a problem, except when shooting on icy/steep slopes where the risk of having the pack slide away on its own is very real.

To protect the camera inside the pack, I typically wrap it in a flexible camera pouch from pixgear/Hakuba, lenses are in their own flexible pouch too, one per lens.

I always keep the ice axe outside the pack and wrap my crampons into a protective pouch that prevents damage to the gear. I also try to keep a layer of clothes in between camera gear and mountaining gear.

This being said, most of my camera bodies look a bit like they have been to Vietnam in the 70s... I am not expecting too much in terms of resell value.

cheers,
Bernard

Hi Bernard,

Here's an offer I'm sure you can't refuse: I'll give you $100 right now for your complete camera kit, and double that if you'll leave in the memory cards with your most recent hundred or so pictures on them.

cheers,

Eric

That is very generous of you Eric, I assume that you have already prepared the extra room you'll need to store all that junk?

Cheers,
Bernard

Dave -

Re. climbing Kilimanjaro: as the guys on the other side of the border - Kenya - never stop telling one, that´s not what the mountain is called by Africans. Can you remember what it IS called? The one on the side - the jagged one - goes by the name of Uluru, Uhuru or something similar. As my visit was over twenty years ago, I forget the details but would love to get it right at last!

Thanks - Rob C

Great article.

I’ve found that the longer you’re out “there” getting remote photography the more one tends to look less and less like the person you started the trip with. I’ve also found that the longer you go without actual bathing conditions the less people want to be around you. Then to top it off I’ve also see small children and some adults actually run away when I first “come down the mountain” and haven’t gotten a chance to freshen up. It can actually become a contest to see who leaves (escapes) the tent first.


don

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilimanjaro#Name

Uhuru Peak is the highest point on the mountain.

Hey, Mr P

That could well be the case, but as I recall, the jagged peak to which the Uhuru Peak name was given is some real distance to the left (viewed from Kenya) of the main, higher, snow-capped bit of mountain, the part generally considered to be Kili. I would hazard a guess that they would be considered as two separate mountains. Also, the Kenyans were very firm to deny that Kilimanjaro exists and I have a feeling they weren´t just playing semantic nationalistic games but trying to educate me. They had no idea the challenge that posed!

Anyway, thanks for confirming the Uhuru Peak part of it for me.

By the way, I think I read elsewhere that you have a B9180? I´d been having problems with squiggly lines appearing in dark/mid tones (B/W) and then discovered that the Optimo (Best in English) setting in my Spanish machine isn´t the best at all: you have to click on to 1200 dpi (ppp in Spain) and then, as if by magic, the problems vanish! Whew.

Rob C

I really enjoyed your tips, but I'd have liked to hear more about the journey's too.

I've always had a fondness for Japan wilderness, the photo's were an inspiration to find more on my next trecks there.

It's funny as I've just returned from there for what I considered a photography trip, but with some people who simply aren't into it, and experienced a lot of the things you appear to warn against (more or less).

Bernard....


I like much your review, is a "credo" of the field photographers, coverall in the referring to "you never walk alone", literally.

You use some tool, like google earth, to select the landscapes previously, or study the form del land with a map of levels, thus to define your final route and to anticipate images that you are going to take and the best position del sun for them?

Or simply find the landscape at the moment in which you happen through there, and to hope that the conditions are the suitable ones for the shot?

Thanks for the kind words.



I have considered it numerous times and tried a couple, but many of the remote area of Japan have pretty coarse coverage only, they provide little more information that hiking maps.

Maps can provide a lot of information, and a bit of imagination helps anticipating opportunities. It is a bit hard to figure out in advance the relative height of the sun vs the surrdounding peaks if any at sunrise/sunset, so that it is better to base a pick of camp location on actual experience.



The above can be useful for grand landscape images, but I also like to focus on more intimate scenes that are difficult to anticipate by looking at maps.

Those are basically improvised in the field.

Cheers,
Bernard