Climb

The November issue of Climb is now out with my Grand Capucin article as the headline feature - including Caff on the cover leading the second pitch. I'm pretty chuffed, its pretty much the most you can hope for after a trip, but was a bit surprised as I would never have picked this out as a potential cover. The main reason being, I suppose, that although its a tough pitch he's actually on fairly steady E1/2 terrain. Plus its pretty much the first climbing shot I took on the trip, and in my mind a classic 'out of options - shoot arse view from belay'. For comparison, the one I had got down as having the most cover potential was this one :


Judge for yourself! My choice ticks all the standard boxes - dramatic, mid-move, on crux pitch, good (hard-won!) high camera position. Though looking closer, there are obvious problems such as shaded face, and perhaps more importantly, none of Caff's three points of contact to the rock are actually visible. Climb's choice of course doesn't suffer from these, which just goes to show how hard it is to be objective with your own shots, and how much of my judgement is affected by the factors at the time the image was taken, and not just the image itself...

Its also nice too see how little of the image is obscured by copy - a consistent criticism of mag's nowadays. Although Climb's new look allows for more info to be placed on the border of the cover, I think the editors are actually making an effort to try to clean up the covers a bit - bravo!