john's blog

Our Peak District Bouldering guidebook, published back in June, has been awarded the Best Guidebook prize at this year’s Banff Mountain Book Festival.

The Banff awards are pretty much the biggest prizes in publishing in the outdoor, adventure and environment genres and it is the second time one of our titles has won at Banff, following the presentation of the prestigious Grand Prize to Jerry Moffatt’s autobiography Revelations in 2009.

Commenting on the book, the Book Festival Jury, said:

It's been a year for occasional weddings: weddings I go to and take along a camera or two, either because I want to, I've been asked to as a favour, or I'm getting paid to. Weddings can be both stressful and great fun in equal measure. Your technique must be sharp on the day, so your images are sharp when you empty your cards for processing. You can't take your camera from our eye - you might miss a shot - yet you have to constantly search for something unique, a fresh angle that will elevate you from the guests with compacts, or, as is often the case these days, 5D mkII's and the like. I've added a small gallery of wedding photographs here. Go take a look.

I recently spent a couple of days in south west England shooting photography for the second edition of Vertebrate Publishing's South West Mountain Biking guidebook. I’d already shot the Quantocks and a big chunk of Exmoor last year, so the focus of this trip was to shoot the remaining Dartmoor and Exmoor images. My partner for the trip was John ‘The Weatherman’ Horscroft and he did a sterling job of riding and re-riding sections of trail while giving the impression he was having a good time (I secretly think that he was...).

David Pickford and Ian Parnell took over as editors of
Climb Magazine last autumn and I was delighted when they offered me the chance to showcase some of my bouldering photography in the Exposure section. The current issue - March 2011 - features 6 pages of bouldering shots from around the UK, with areas included such as Trwyn Talfarach on the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales, Stanage Plantation in the Peak District, and Back Bowden Doors in Northumberland.

David and Ian are doing a great job with the magazine and I hope to see many more of my shots in there in the future.

Photography projects I'm working on at the moment...

A new edition of our
South West Mountain Biking guidebook. A chance to ride the great trails on Dartmoor, Exmoor and - particularly - the Quantocks. The photo here was taken on Exmoor on a good ride from Porlock Weir to County Gate and back. A tough start and first half, but finished with an incredible descent back into Porlock.

We're also working on the second edition of our
Peak District Bouldering guidebook. A lot has changed since the last edition nearly 6 years ago and this is a big job, both photography- and writing-wise. We're very motivated to produce a very special climbing guidebook.

Both books due out early 2011.