Adventure Sports Photographer Editorial Corporate Stock Advertising Photography

The Reality of Adventure Photography
by Michael Clark

Control is a myth. I am realizing that five days into a three day assignment in Joshua Tree National Park. The soggy walls of my mountaineering tent do not bode well for a rosy fingered dawn. I've gotten up at 5 AM for the last five days trying to get first light on a particular landscape. So far it has been raining sideways for those five straight days and I have yet to shoot a whole roll of film.

The campground is empty save for my friends Kurt and Elaina Smith. I have spent five days hiking around in the rain checking angles and the set up for hundreds of different images. The best photo op in the last week has been shooting photos inside Kurt and Elaina’s warm and cozy van which doubles as their home. If not for the satellite TV and DVD player in their van we would have gone berserk. Luckily, the next morning dawned clear and I was in position when first light hit the rock arch I was set up to photograph.

I photograph a variety of outdoor adventure sports including rock and ice climbing, mountaineering, kayaking, mountain biking, and trail running as well as landscapes and travel images. Sometimes I am alone shooting landscapes, but most of the time I am working with professional athletes in fairly remote locations.

Much of my work is done on assignment for editorial or commercial clients. Assignments can range from an afternoon near my office in Santa Fe to weeks on end in remote corners of the world. I am usually traveling seven or more months a year. The rest of the time I am in the office like a hermit talking with clients, scanning, sorting and processing images or sending out submissions and invoices to clients. There are no regular "hours" and I often loose track of which day it is. I can’t remember the last time I took an actual vacation. My idea of a vacation these days is coming home from a grueling assignment and not having to get up at 5 AM.

Part of my workday, when I am back in the office, is a workout so that I can stay fit enough to get the shot while out in the field. I am almost always carrying more equipment than the people I am with and in most cases I need to be ahead of them to get the images I want. A normal day shooting climbing involves at the very least a 70 to 80 pound pack and I have carried up to 130 pound packs on big wall excursions. Big walls usually involve carrying loads of ropes and hardware up the backside of the cliff. And sometimes it takes more time to set up for a shot than it does to take it.

I tend to go very light when the pack starts to get heavy. Now in the digital age, my main kit for just about anything is a Nikon D300, three or four lenses, a small flash and plenty of memory cards. I almost always bring a Nikon D2x as back up, especially in remote places and when I am on assignment. Usually my Lowepro Specialist 85 AW is packed with the basic kit to get to the base of the wall and then I pick and choose the appropriate items for the situation. At most I take two or three lenses up on the wall with me. If I am on a rope I am usually fairly close to the climbers and I can take the lighter 17-35f/2.8 and 28-70 f/2.8.

The Specialist AW fully loaded weighs roughly twenty five pounds. That isn’t what I would call lightweight but it fits nicely into an expedition pack filled with ropes, climbing hardware, extra clothing, food and water. When I am shooting aerobic sports I trim it down to one body and one or two lenses depending on the sport. In the mountains I trim it down even more. I find the less gear I carry the more it forces me to become creative. On the flip side a lot of my work these days involves using studio strobes on location. I have hiked lightweight strobes into the backcountry but for the really big productions there is an enormous amount of gear involved.

Shooting an assignment is hard and stressful work. You have to come back with "the shots" and it doesn’t always go as planned. Throw in the fact that I am often working on ropes and hanging thousands of feet off the deck and you start to get the picture, no pun intended. It can take a lot of time just to get into position and sometimes I wonder if my success as an adventure photographer is directly related to my ability to coax athletes to get up early, warm up on their hardest projects and to do it "one more time."

Many of the athletes I work with have become close friends over the years. To capture what they are experiencing I have to be there with them and that isn’t always pleasant. Most of the time we are camping and sometimes even simple things like a shower seem a world away. National Geographic’s photo editor, Kent Kobersteen summed it up when he said, "The really strong photos come from those situations where the last thing you want to do is take pictures – when everything is going to hell, when the storms are raging and everyone is trying to hang on. Those are going to be the most telling images."

Obviously climbing photography presents some danger if you want to get above the climbers but on a recent assignment in South Dakota that danger became very real. I was shooting in the Needles of South Dakota. These formations are beautiful and sport burly multi-pitch traditional climbs not for the weak minded.

The climbers and I started at 5 AM that morning and the early morning light was perfect. Around 8:30 AM I started jumaring up one of my static ropes to the top of East Gruesome Spire, a 80 meter (270 foot) tower in the Spires. About 25 feet from the top I looked up to see my rope stuck on a crystal 10 feet above me. When I moved around a bit and looked again I realized that the crystal was very sharp and was cutting through my rope. There was white core material exposed and from what I could see it appeared that I was hanging from only half of the rope's sheath!

Luckily, the climbers were still above me on top of the spire. I immediately called up to the climbers, asked them to throw a rope down and put me on belay. That took about three minutes. Those three minutes were intense. I started praying and preparing myself to meet God face to face. I had time to think, too much time to think. I was expecting that half a sheath wouldn't hold for very long, seconds at most.

The climbers lowered the rope to me. I tied in faster than I had ever tied in before and they belayed me to the top. The crystal my rope was on was very sharp and there were many others just like all over the wall. The rope was not over an edge, which is an obvious hazard. It was just on a large finger-like quartz crystal. As it turned out, my rope wasn't cut as badly as I had thought. I was hanging on three of the seven strands of the core! In retrospect, that is pretty scary but better than hanging on half of the sheath. Once I was on top of the spire, I had to pull it together and keep shooting.

The next few days were intense after such a close call. Flowers looked brighter, the sky bluer. I was also praying a lot more and more intensely. A few days later, I was 200+ feet off the deck in the Cathedral Spires again. Needless to say it was mentally challenging, but those images might well be the cover images.

Thankfully, most of the work I do isn’t quite as intense and it is rare to see such sharp rock. In comparison, shooting other sports seems fairly mundane compared to photographing rock climbing, at least in terms of my personal risk. And I am always aware of the sudden "courage" athletes’ gain when a camera is pointed at them. So far I have not had anyone get injured while I was photographing them but there have been some very close calls.

I have seen kayakers under the water for twelve minutes, mountain bikers jumping off forty foot cliffs and crashing hard, and climbers taking large risks on high ball boulders. The kayaker survived because of his wise decisions and with the aid of his experienced companions. The mountain biker was scraped up a bit and his front wheel exploded when he hit the ground but he was amazingly unhurt. And I have only seen a few really scary bouldering falls, none of which have resulted in serious injury.

The reality is there is precious little I can control on most of my photo shoots aside from coordinating the action or adjusting my strobe lighting. The reality is freelance photographers might soon be a "dying breed." The competition is fierce in this business and corporations are always asking for more image usage rights with no extra compensation. There is more competition for photographers than there has ever been and photographers have to be business savvy as well as able to produce top-notch work. The reality is that only 1% of photographers will ever gross more than $100,000 per year from their work. The reality is that 90% of photographers will never make more than $100,000 in their entire career! Thankfully, I am not in that 90%, but that is no reason to think that I have "made it." And with Orphan Works legislation in Congress this year our ability to protect our copyright and our livelihood to is in jeopardy.

On top of that, digital photography has arrived and with it photographers are taking on huge expenses they never had to deal with before. Digital has also brought with it a very steep learning curve, the opportunity to create images that were not possible before and unprecedented control. And it is also making photography more exciting than it has been in a long time.

In the end, there is much more to this job than just capturing the images. Photographers tend to make it sound so glorious. They leave out the unpleasantries like sleeping in airports, 90-hour work weeks and the tough realties of owning your own business. Just making a living in this profession is a success in many people’s minds. In this era of ever increasing expenses and shrinking space rates you have to work hard and count ‘perseverance’ as a good friend.

contact info: (505) 438-0828 | mjcphoto@comcast.net | www.michaelclarkphoto.com