pho⋅tog⋅ra⋅phy: n: First try at indoor rock climbing

I was introduced to rock climbing when I was a first year medical student. Because of the seemingly endless number of exams constantly on the horizon (cram for Pharmacology, take pharm test, rest day, cram for anatomy test 3 days later, etc), it was customary for the students of my class to find as many distractions as possible. Incidentally, I think the total number of hobbies our class as a whole enjoyed doubled in our first year of medical school...

Anyway, I remember the first time I went rock climbing was with my brother. He essentially dragged me kicking and screaming, and in hindsight, I'm not even really sure I was so reluctant to try it. I remember the first climber I saw was climbing on the ceiling, ballooning around on these huge holds, 40 ft off the deck. I was amazed...one, at the fact that he was on the ceiling, but two, because I saw the 40-degree overhanging wall he had to climb to get there.

I had also just obtained my first dedicated speedlight, Canon's 580 EX II. I was just learning how to use it, and good God was it complicated. Photographers are always obsessing about light...how much is there, what is the source, how big is the source, what color is it, etc. etc. I had no idea what I was doing. :)

The photo below is my buddy Josh climbing on the ceiling that I was gawking at the first time I had ever been climbing at this indoor climbing gym. To get to the position I was at to get these shots, I ascended a rope using an ascension device and an aider. Now, I'm a pretty mediocre climber by climbing standards, but ascending that single static rope 40 ft straight up may have been harder than any climb I had tried before. Not to mention I was lugging my camera gear up with me, and of course my fear of heights and dropping expensive equipment 40 ft to the deck tightened my sphincter a few notches.

And this is the 40-degree "prow" that Josh had to climb FIRST to get to the ceiling portion. What a beast!

The style of climbing that I'm very very interested in is bouldering. This is where the climber climbs without a rope relatively low to the ground (<15 ft?). Many proponents of this style of climbing claim that it distills rock climbing into just a few moves, and allows the climber to concentrate on pure, hard moves. The reasons I like it are two-fold: 1) I have no endurance for sport climbing, and 2) I don't have the patience for sport climbing. I'm very much an "immediate results" kind of guy, hence bouldering really appealed to me in that sense.