hey man, like the new look site... was just wondering about the gallery and quicktime links?? didn't seem to be working? keep up the good work :-) JON

Hi Jon. Glad you like the new layout. Not sure how I scraped my way through all this html stuff & xml..What the hell is xml anyway?...Aye the gallery & Quicktme links, PDF stuff...all that, will be up randomly as I get things sorted over winter....especially the Quicktime movies. These are just more things I'm having to learn the depths of without any kind of professional guidance, support, backing or supportive contact from anyone 'in the scene' or with experience...like say Hot Aches or Posing Productions or empty promises of dvd colaboration from John Watson that don't materialize, or from whoever else I've only met 2 or 3 times on various damp days, who then feels they are qualified to comment on & weigh a life of dedicated vertical process & lines up rock faces with sequences they can't even comprehend, let alone do. It's frustrating & frankly dissapointing to say the least, considering the loud & impressively grating noise they've all made about it...So far this year there hasnt even been one simple email or call to see how it's coming together or if it is at all, but I'm betting they've had time for a quick negative rant on a web forum or beer table somewhere. Lets not go there aye. People forget the facts of solo film making way to quickly or are cluelessly oblivious to them, but find it easy to scream 'we demand a movie' at the top of their lungs, becuase it involves little more work than ranting, then eating another banana...Also & from scratch I have to learn media tools Ive never touched...along with editing suites, hosting & the time consuming, baffling waffle that insists in following on, talking nonsense about frame rates, stops, layers, compression, syncing & critical errors...so it will understandably take longer to achieve what I have in mind. I can only do so much before I have to go out & vent a bucket of frustration by free-tooling up dead trees & biting into telegraph poles with the axes up on the hill. I only very recently managed to get a piece of kit that will do the job I want in film, but it will be of a quality & style matching the photography & with what I have in mind, beyond the norm, or, unique in quality... There are no shortcuts in doing things properly aye. There are no shortcuts in climbing a V15. It takes a lot of effort, concentration, solving physical elements & mistakes to come out with the perfect sequence...you can't miss bits out, miss out the decades of thrust & failure you've gone through & get a real result of any worth...You don't walk into Nevis Sport, buy a gortex & expect the skills for soloing Zero or the Fingers in a whiteout to be bestowed upon you aye...
I also have to want to deal with finding the motivation, the powerband & retraining the peaks above natural physical plateaus, to re-climb a few brilliant, but extremely hard lines & super intense crux sequences nobody else can touch, but that I am also totally bored with. Normally you do something once, maybe twice & it's done...you move on. That's the window you allow yourself since holding onto that level of peak intensity indefinitely, is arguably harder than climbing the line itself, if not impossible...Human physiology simply can't retain that logarithmic level of operation adinfinitum, yet, on a whim, that's what they're asking for.

My nature predicts that I treat filming & stills with the same dedication I treat climbing. Being lost in amongst all those vindictive & negative climbing forums with their aligned misinformation, loaded agendas & free roaming ventilation of anything positive straying into the domain of the idiot, was enough for me. I had to leave & didn't know I could do photography, or that there was any worth to it. We never photographed anything in the early days...but oh if some of the soloing had been captured. I'm not good for much outside of climbing or knitting rocks together, so knowing every increment is a plus sign to a learning curve...but I'd rather be training on the woody in a rainstormed barn to be honest, engramming for a goal, making faces at the collie, & pulling sheep down from the gullies with old Domhnall. The way i see it, when I can no longer climb through arthritis or decapitation, black toes or indeed alcoholism, should I ever choose that unlikely path as a bodach, the ability to photograph the future, barrelling V16 or E13, will also provide them, as well as myself...with a solid form of documented days & legends, ergo, helping our inheritors in my own small way, to avoid any unneccecary controversy & also provide some, hopefully inspiring, black & white imagery or film for those who could not be present when the chalk dust & scrubbed holds filled our throats. When my early hard stuff went up, when I first wrestled with V13, digital cameras were an expensive myth, Dave MacLeod was a schoolboy & Java was an oral fixation in the guise of coffee drifting through Tibetan streets...

I never thought to photograph every single hold on the rock or every corner turned, every floorstep, footfall, camp, bar, personality, every cloud, every moraine - they were just there, part of the ordinary world, almost unspectacular in a way & they still are there. The refined conclusions of many outings, still unrepeated. Today the obsessive nature by which climbers seem to digitally record everything from picking their noses in a tent to the final evening thrutch with obligatory crass sunset snap, Murdo sitting on a rock...oh, heres Murdo sitting on another rock...Murdo eating a sangwi in front of Torres Del Paine...is worrying. If we become sleepily reliant on those technologies rather than on the brain, the sparky senses & available emotion as an event recorder, the core elements, the art, expression & truth will become lost, as will mountain writers who relate those experiences in textual imagery. Everything will have the potential to become cold flat pointless fact & imagery, a short life with no heart at all...

I have met so called climbers descending the Cuillin becuase they have run out of camera battery - not becuase of high storms. But what is a storm in a dance as wild as this - a reason to stay & fight. I'm catching up with it all though, as a medium...but I'm not in a hurry, no by a long shot. Do I like, as a person, the probing interference of technology into climbing, bouldering & the mountain enviroment?...I humour it. That said, I have my mobile Razr phone mounted on my mountain bike handlebar & a blue tooth dongle in my ear for long road riding trips....The disease is upon me.

Some of the excellent PDF topos mean getting together with Lee & James & other local activists to integrate independant works, so they will take time, the gallery & photo-sequencial shots need laying out in Flash. The reviews after lots of climbing...the training articles are near completion though, & its all to some degree, dependant on my own & other peoples agendas....but positively, a lot should come together from now, into & through the winter months. Writing a training article ironically can be a waste of training time. Pray for rain, gales, blizzards, injury, gabbro rash & midgies & it'll all get done quicker...but bare with me, I'm a climber not a desk-jockey & there's still more waves of boulders, limits & screamers to contend with...It's a full time life. You know, if the majority of these remote hard lines were at Dumbarton industria , they'd have been filmed, stamped, sealed, doubt-proofed & delivered to every whinger on the planet while helicopters circled ovehead dropping Hebridean propaganda; MacLeod would still be falling off them & I would have 365 belayers, 365 spotters, one for each day of the year, 36.5 for every trad line, who all knew eachother from the highlands mutual willy waving nightschool...& nothing would be out of place.

But it will be here, as it invariably is...along with brand new hard link-ups, new important bouldering & Sprad projects but with one of those very marginal members of the human race as a first ascensionist, I doubt they will scarcely rattle the leaves in amongst those big trees & their noisy paraded finery.

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As an aside & on movies again, Dave Birketts comment at the end of climbing 'Missing' E7, 7a is easily the best I've heard all year. Lightened my morning up no end:

https://www.posingproductions.com/video.php?form_action=play&video_id=58