Nottingham Universities Varsity 2018
The Varsity Competition at the Depot Nottingham is always a colourful affair!
Tonnes of psyched students from Nottingham Trent, and The university of Nottingham descend on the centre for a day of climbing, and a grand final in the evening to determine the overall winner.
Lowrider
Despite the grim conditions up at the coldest and blusteriest boulder on Stanage edge, we found some good friction between the clouds on Lowrider.
Props to Joe, and Andi for sticking together some good links, and especially to Joe for somehow climbing in only a t-shirt without dying from hypothermia!
Check out his coaching business - (he's based in NZ, but he's bound to give you a hand if you've got some questions!)
WBL 2016/17 Final Round at The Depot Nottingham
Photos from the WBL 2016/17 final at The Depot Nottingham
Tour De BIFF 2017 at The Depot Manchester
Last Friday, I was lucky enough to take some snaps at the 2nd Round of the Tour De Biff at The Depot Manchester. This competition is a little unlike most others, with competitors not being allowed use of their feet! You might think this would make for an impressive show - and you would be right - but it also makes it a little trickier to capture really engaging photos.
Normally when shooting climbing, I try to capture either the emotions on people's faces, or the cool shapes that their bodies make with the wall...When people are campussing however, they don't look down at all!
Equally, capturing wild moves, or unlikely positions is also a great way of creating an intriguing photo. But when campussing, people tend to stay quite controlled, because the forces involved are put down solely through the arms and hands, instead of by the legs and feet. This means that it is way, waaay harder to hold these unlikely positions, and far harder to generate the sorts of forces that you let you get into them in the first place.
Nevertheless, I got my flash involved, and with a loaned 24-70 lens, I got stuck into the action and tried to get a good variety of shots to cover the different problems that were up around the centre.
Full credit to the Routesetters for managing to split a pretty competitive field, and massive thanks to the Depot for sorting out such a quality competition once again!
CWIF 2016 Finals
Images from the Finals of CWIF 2016
I might not have had unlimited access, but I'm dead chuffed with the set.
http://www.acefilmandphotography.com/cwif-2016-finals
Let me know what you think.
Archie
Varsity Competition
Last week we held the Nottingham Universities Varsity Competition at the Depot in Nottingham. This was the first time that I had set finals problems for a commercial competition, and it was a really interesting experience, loads more pressure than normal, but I think we did a really good job of splitting the competitors.
While the competition was running, I ran around taking pictures of as many problems as I could. Towards the end of the qualification round, I took out my flash and started to get a little more artistic with the shots. Leading to perhaps my favourite climbing photo so far.
Voyager and The Ace
Today, one of my friends came up from Bristol to try and snag an ascent of the famed gritstone testpiece 'Voyager'. For those that dont know, Voyager is fiercely sharp, and one of the hardest boulder problems in the Peak District. The sitstart was completed in 2006 by Ben Moon and given the grade 8B+, it has not been repeated...
Hamish had been trying the line earlier in the season, but hadn't succeeded. When I saw the facebook post about it, I knew that I had to get there to take some pictures when he got back on it.
While there, I also took some snaps of James Squire, and Nathan Phillips who were also trying the line. No doubt one of them will grab an ascent within another couple of sessions.
After we were done at Voyager, everyone packed up to head over to Stanage. While we were in the carpark, we met Billy Ridal, who had just done Careless Torque. Conditions were good for the day. Despite this news, Hamish, James and Nathan chose to try their luck on another of the hardest grit problems by tackling 'The Ace', which is another 8B - this time put up by Jerry Moffatt.