Ice climbing scares people. I'm not sure if it's the equipment, the cold, the ice, the height or a combination. While I feel a different sort of fear when I climb ice, I can sympathize with any reasons to be nervous about climbing frozen water. After years of climbing I thought I had come to terms with my own fears, until I swapped tools and started carrying a camera.

There is security in movement while climbing in an environment that is falling apart all around you. To move means safety and progress. To remain still makes you a target.

As I hung in my harness, swinging awkwardly above the climbers, I did my best not to knock down any ice and keep myself protected from any debris falling from above as I moved back and forth. The pillar creaked and groaned as the climber ascended and as I photographed, I calculated my escape if the worst happened and the free hanging icicle above snapped.

The best cure of this kind of fear is time. The longer I was in the environment, the more I relaxed. Or became exhausted. Either way, you can only hold on to this type of fear for so long. Eventually it passed and I was left, sweating and hanging in space, alone with the remains of my fear.

Grey skies. Snow banks. Studio backdrops. They will always be interchangeable to me.

While the look of this image at first glance is that it was shot in a studio, there was in fact an enormous, raging waterfall only a few feet behind the "backdrop". I had been instructed not to take any staged images, but we had filled the cards, and we now had the space to bend the rules, if not break them completely.

It was a moment I couldn't ignore. The serenity of the final images would betray just how violent the environment truly was. This image is one of those moments that without explanation does not carry the same weight.

In this case, knowing more elevates the experience.

Color evokes feeling, the color and tone dictating the feeling.

It was the end of a long day and week. We were all completely frozen, as was all of our gear. A thin film of frozen water clung to the outside of my camera as it hung around my neck. It felt good to test the gear and push it to the limit of its performance. The same could have been said about myself and the athletes I was photographing.

We had arrived back to the parking lot that had been full when we arrived, and now as the light turned the world blue and calm and frigid, we stood alone. It had been a whirlwind of a shoot and I was exhausted but I wanted to get the camera up one more time to make this image, as a bookmark to the end of the experience.