I first met Logan Barber in 2015 when we partnered in photographing two of his major climbing projects over several weeks in China. A year later he was spending his second summer projecting the notoriously hard traditional rock climb, Cobra, in Squamish, BC. I was still living in China at the time, but had a trip to visit my girlfriend in the Bay Area around the same time. I managed to squeeze in a whirlwind 3 day trip up to Squamish and back to photograph Logan on the route. I drove up 16 hrs in the afternoon, arrived in the early morning hours, pitched the tent and caught a few hours of sleep before the town woke up. The first day we devoted to scouting and preparation, though Logan had already done some homework in scouting positions prior to my arrival. His suggestion to shoot from a tree diagonally across from the wall turned out to be a great spot for capturing the entire route, which I enhanced further by fixing a line between the tree and wall, and suspended between the two to optimize my position. After setting up the rope and taking numerous exposure test shots, we noted the best timing for a balanced, soft light, without losing too much light, considering we were in the forest.
The next day we returned in the early afternoon and Logan made numerous genuine attempts on climbing the route, while I fired away hanging from the rope without interruption. The move depicted in the image is one of the major cruxes in a sequence of multiple difficult moves. The climber pulls on a single finger jammed palm up in the crack and reaches high to jam a few fingers from the other hand palm down in the crack at the lip of the wall, before pulling up over the lip. It's also one of the more dynamic moves of the route, because due to the overhang, the climber must fight to manage the swing and keep his feet on the wall. After Logan had his fill of attempts for the day, I repositioned back on the wall over the crack, where I could see directly into the crack. Logan re-climbed the short mono-finger crux sequence a few more times, primarily for the generation of photos from a second angle, with our last remaining light. The next day I put in my own share of effort driving 20+ hrs straight back to the Bay Area, during which I got stopped for several hours at the US/Canadian border, fought through Portland evening rush-hour traffic, and then finally Bay Area morning rush-hour traffic.
The colors and tones of the wall and forest were quite soft with little contrast, so I decided to process several of the images in black and white with added contrast between the climber and his surroundings, while also highlighting the route itself. The black and white rendition was also chosen specifically to differentiate my images from others taken of the route in previous years.