The Onsight Chronicles

The last five months have been uber busy with near back-to-back trips for climbing and photography. Well… PHEW! It been great fun but darn tiring work at times. I just realised I’ve been home from my last trip for a few weeks now and I’m actually glad, yep glad, to be home for bit before packing my bags and heading off again (I’ve got a least a few more weeks before that).

Good to be home and it’s been good to have the time to catch up on all the work that’s been piling up in the office… So last week I finished editing down my shots from the last few months to 7500 “keepers”, captioned them, sorted and rated them, and adjusted the best of them ready for use (there’s still a pile of good old fashioned films I’ve yet to edit, but that’s another story). This has meant that in the last few days I’ve been able to finish off about ten photo submissions for various clients, with many more that’ll be finished in the next few days.

Thank the lord for Adobe Lightroom, the program I seem to use a lot of my time these days. It’d be even harder to get through all this work without it. Here’s a screenshot with work on a clients photo submission in progress:

Meanwhile, in that other “office”, here’s some shots of me at work in China a few weeks ago. First shots were two days before Leo and co climbed the West Peak of Mt Huashan, I’m abseiling down to work out – or guess – where I think they might top out on the 600m cliff.

I was bemused by this “take care when taking photos” sign; does that mean me? Gosh no, heck I use a rope! But the sign nearly made a good anchor…

It was a white-out but there was no time to waste sitting around.

This was not the right place…

In the end I had to set the rope and abseil down in five different places before I was happy that I’d found the right spot to rig my 180 metres of rope.

Two days later when Leo was climbing he paused for a moment and snapped this photo of me at work – photographing him! Thanks Leo.

No real great point to this post, just explaining why I’ve been busy and blogging so little of late, and sharing a bit about how I work. I love my job but one of the things I love the most is that both the photography/travel and the office provide balance.