SF Mag Pic Breakdown

So since the February issue of San Francisco has already hit stands, replacing the issue I graced the cover of (*sniffle , I think it’s ok to post the full res pics of the Mag cover, and the original Image. >>>>>>

Honestly (and Rod could sense this), after our first day of shooting at goat rock, I had my doubts about how many usable pictures Rod was gonna come up with… the scenes we were shooting just seemed too staged and cheesy, and the art director wasn’t really directing…. Even after our second day of shooting at the endless bummer rock… well, I had my doubts. Sorry Rod! After he told me his plan of taking 15 shots and splicing them into one amazing image to use for the cover I was thinking, “why doesn’t he just go shoot from the freaken perch like everyone else? At least he could see get the city in the shot from there?” Even Ben, my friend and loyal belayer of the day (he got to send Endless and work out the moves on Surf Sarafi so don’t feel too bad for him) who is on the quite side, had voiced his disbelief in Rod’s artistic direction… sorry again! But, the man had a plan and was one step ahead. Basically, we didn’t realize how much of a photoshop wizard Rod really was. He spliced the original iamge, the one SF Mag adopted for the cover, from about 15 different raw files that we’re taken that afternoon, many from different vantage points. He couldn’t actually see the city or any distinguishing features thereof from the place he shot me on the wall, so from the base of the climb he shot several pictures of the city and the horizon, including Monterrey bay, which can be seen in the OG image. Then he took several closeups of me, full frame on the route itself with no background and spliced them in there too. Then he took pics of a few of the rocks surrounding the climb on the hillside and in the foreground. He took all those shots, worked his magic, and wallah! When he emailed me the preliminary image I was, pleasantly surprised to say the least. After the mag came out I was at mission cliffs and ran into Scott Fry (the old-school hard man/bay area climbing legend who FA’ed Endless Bummer and surf Safari in the mid-90s). He said he bought a copy of the mag after he saw it at a store and wondered how someone had managed to snag the angle that had alluded Ansel Adams, who shot Ron Kauk on the route many years earlier… that made me chuckle.

I used to frown upon pics in climbing mags with bad artificial light or a posed down feel (and I still do) not that either of those are a part of the above images, but I think in the case of the the SF Mag cover, a little doctoring was just fine and produced an image that I’m proud to be a part of. Ok I’ll stop slobbing my own nob now. Check out Rod’s site and blog if you haven’t already. Here is an interesting blog post written by Rod on the above subject. Also, thanks to Rob for framing a bunch of photos for me, including a blown-up version of the cover shot. WERD.