My photography

The majesty of a snow covered mountain range, cutting through clouds and glinting like a knife in the sun, takes my breath away. The peace of the hills infuses me with itself. The wind in my hair and mud on my face as I speed down a forest track reminds me I'm alive. The complex interplay of shapes, textures and lines in nature and man's creations astounds me.

Capturing these moments of beauty, I take them with me. When I look back and see them again I'm inspired for the future. I hope that you view them and take some of the beauty, some of the inspiration, for yourself.

As if being a stupid keen climber, mountain biker, snowboarder and general outdoorsman isn't enough, I'm also a photo junkie. I find it impossible to ignore the beauty that my sports expose me to and cannot understand how others presented with the same magnificent scenes cannot yearn to capture and share them forever.

To create an amazing sports image is to capture the essence of the individual as well as the surroundings. Yet to capture both the action and the situation is often extremely difficult. To get close enough to be in on the action, yet to include enough of the landscape to give the viewer the whole, is difficult if not impossible to attain and it remains my main motivation, being oh so sweet on the odd occasion it is attained.

I haul my camera bag everywhere with me, and have done since the very beginning of my photographic days. The best photographer on the earth hasn't got a hope of capturing a scene if they've no camera with them. As a result, my image library is now pretty extensive. It includes images of most of the main domestic climbing venues in Scotland, a good number in England and an expanding range of locations in Europe.

The gear, at the time

My gear bag is always the largest and heaviest around. As a climber, sportsman and photographer, I have to lug two sets of kit everywhere. My workplace is usually half way up a cliff or tree, and I'm often hanging from ropes in uncomfortable positions, spinning like a top. As a climbing, outdoors photographer, I have to be a rope-access technician, climber, field IT expert and creative photographer all at the same time. I frequently get strange looks when I take out my camera halfway up a 200m climb. But, in the end, it's worth it.

Everything here was shot on Canon EOS 40D and Canon EOS 350D and EX-Z1000, on Sigma glass, always in RAW. The camera settings you see under each photograph come out of the files themselves, not from anything typed in later.

About this archive

The original andymain.co.uk ran from 2006 on hand-written PHP and MySQL, with a Flash gallery that later became a MooTools one. It went dark years ago. This is a rebuild: the photographs come from the original files, keywords and camera settings included, and the journal entries were recovered from the Internet Archive along with the comments people left at the time.

A handful of things did not survive. Eight photographs referenced by journal entries are gone from both the old files and the archive, so those posts have gaps. Some comment timestamps were already broken on the live site and are marked as such rather than invented.

If you would like to use an image, or you spot something that has gone missing, get in touch.