The Climbing Club

A day after the drunken pumpkin carving, Annelisa, Grace, Obadiah and I got a reasonable start out to Leavenworth. We met at Castle Rock and split up: they to the upper wall, we to the lower. It was a great day with beautiful colors (interestingly there's almost no bright reds east of the pass, or at least in the Tumwater canyon), sunny weather, and great rock.

Full details and some really nice photos by Annelisa here

Looks like a very fine day! I love the photos of climbing in all the fall colour!
Looks like my kind of climbing as well... have to find someone to head to Leavenworth with me

That is a fun climb! Definitely come back for Canary, it is almost as good. Annelisa, remind me what camera you bought again. I love the vivid color of the pics!

Indeed, a nice weekend out. Sabre was harder than I remembered. Definitely 1950's style 5.5.





We headed out to Vantage for Sunday, and had a great day out somewhere beyond the "3rd gully". We didn't have a book with us, so we were just picking climbs of the variety "I can definitely climb that" and "I might not be able to climb it, but at least it's well bolted!". We did about 6 pitches, some of it quite hard for both of us, but I've no idea what they were.





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Edit: A little browsing online has revealed the following. We climbed at Riverview Columns and Riverview Park. The routes we climbed are officially rated (5.8, 10A, 10A, 10B, 5.7, 10B). See the nice online guide here:. Grace had her first sport lead on the 5.8, and her second on the 5.7 (her first lead ever was a pitch of WI-3, and her 2nd 5.6 trad). Good times, but here's an interesting illustration of the grade inflation at Vantage: I think we both found Sabre (5.5) to be harder than either the 5.7, or the 5.8 at Vantage.

Fun full weekend at some of Washington's finest crags. It did get a bit chilly at Leavenworth after the sun disappeared, but the experience did little to whet my appetite of the fine granite climbs. I'm looking forward to climbing there some more when the sun reappears. As ever, Vantage offered some fun and challenging climbs. Obadiah commented that it's a great place to become a good climber due to the close proximity and easy accessibility of a seemingly indefinite number of climbs; if inclined, a person can get in a tonne of climbing on some hard routes in just one afternoon.

Valerie, because it'll probably be about a month before Annelisa checks this again, I'll answer for her. It's the Canon G11, the newer model of the same camera that Obadiah uses. It's something like a hybrid between a nice point and shoot and a DSLR. I'm sure Obadiah or Annelisa can tell you more about it, but the G11 is apparently somewhat better at low-light photography than the G10, and features a pull out LCD panel that can also be swiveled on the x axis so you can see yourself when taking self-shots.

I'd say it was a great purchase, because Annelisa's (and yours with her camera) shots came out awesome. I love the vivid colors. Looks like it was a great day out for all of you.

That camera does seem pretty great. A hell of a lot less bulky than my rebel, I'm guessing. Did you have to to a lot of post processing to boost the color saturation and contrast?

@ Kris: Actually, all the photos I took were with my canon powershot and all the photos by annelisa are with the G11. I think the results are incredibly different.

@ Lucas: neither Annelisa or I have actually learned what to do with the photos in RAW format yet. I just grabbed the photos off her computer in jpeg format and used the "fix lighting" tool in picasa to improve them a little. picasa didn't really do much with them, whereas with my camera it usually makes rather drastic (and generally good) changes with the same tool. That's one of the reasons I'm pretty impressed with the G11 - the photos look great even when just shooting in jpeg. I think right now it's set to shoot and save in raw and jpeg.

Good call with the Jpegs plus RAW. RAW format is pretty sweet stuff, and you can change white balance really easily without stuff going haywire, and bring out detail like in lightroom. That's my primary photo touchup tool. I started off that way too, but now I've just switched to RAW only.

I am pretty impressed with those jpegs though! If you can't get by without post processing, it will definitely save time.

I think the G10/11 are the best "climbing cameras" currently available. You get the creative flexibility and photo-rescue capabilities of the RAW format, without the bulk of a whole dSLR. There are other small RAW-capable cameras coming out, some with better glass, and better (larger) sensors. But none as far as I'm aware have the climbing-critical features of the G series:
-One handed operation
-Auto lens cap
-Flat "off" profile

Manual focus and interchangeable lenses are great for artistic flexibility, but not so much so when you are belaying (or just holding on) with one hand and shooting with the other.

The major disadvantage to these cameras is the slow AF and shot-to-shot time. It's annoying to have to wait more than a second between pictures when things are happening fast.

Sounds like a perfect climbing camera. I'll have to try one out sometime soon. My current climbing camera ended up getting a tiny hair stuck in the CCD some time last May. Have you guys noticed the squiggle in EVERY photo from May 'til now? It really shows up when photographing sky or snow (which I plan to do a lot of in the near future). Thanks for doing the research on what to get, I might pick one up sometime soon. Again, nice pics Annelisa and Obadiah!

On the climbing camera front this makes interesting reading:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/revie ... /s90.shtml

Mel has one, and I got to play with it on Halloween for a little while. Seems like a really solid little camera!