This may surprise you, but before I was a photographer, I was a rock climber.  Not professionally, but from grade 11 to the middle or end of University it was what I did on evenings and weekends.  I loved it.  Being 18 helped, probably my prime fitness, no job (or at least no job I cared about), free time, and I wasn’t old enough to worry and get stressed out about the cost or logistics of, for example, driving to Yosemite for a week.  I had nothing else going on on the weekends so what else am I going to do other than get up at 6am, pick up my buddy in Abbotsford, drive an hour and a half to Squamish, climb all day, grab a meal at McDonalds and then drive back home, then repeat the next day.  After school or university I’d head out to the small little rock in Abbotsford, climb for a couple of hours after school and then go home.  When the weather got bad I just moved to the climbing gym.  In fact, I used to get phone calls there (it was the pre-cell phone days) from my parents when they needed to get a hold of me.

Yours truly climbing in Tuolumne Meadows – 1996… (sorry for the horribly angled image)

And in all this time I wasn’t a photographer.  The best I had was a little point and shoot camera with only two controls on it, the shutter button and a switch on the back to go between 100, 200, and 400 ISO film.  I took it to the climbing gym a couple of times and on the two trips to Yosemite I took.

I really wish I’d gotten into photography back then.  I think about the things I saw and did and the memories of the amazing time I had I can imagine the amazing images and stories I could have told with a camera and a bit of skill on my side.

But alas (or maybe for the better), I’m left with only a collection of photos and a lot of memories.  Now I am a photographer though, I know I’ll have a camera on whatever my next great adventure is!