Whether he’s shooting with his Canon EOS 5D or climbing, the California native Jim Thornburg ( jimthornburg.com), 43, is at home at the crags. Thornburg first hit the rocks at 17 and has since combined stone and photography into his life’s work, traveling the globe. His first feature for Climbing was 1991’s “Steel Wheels” (No. 131), about Western limestone; his most recent was “More Gunky than Funky” (No. 258), about the Shawangunks. And among the many covers he’s shot, one top seller has been No. 218’s image of Rachel Babkirk on Leave it to Jesus, in the New River Gorge. For Thornburg, the easy part is snapping the pictures; the hard part is everything else.

It was raining in Berkeley the day I bought my first pair of EBs. I decided to climb on a university building that was protected from the rain. Officer Freeman, a policeman who used to chase us when we rode our skateboards on campus, caught me traversing the building and arrested me on the spot. I spent the next four hours in jail, refusing to give him my mom’s phone number. On the way home, I accidentally ran over a pedestrian with my VW Bug, bruising her up a bit. It might have been my worst day of climbing ever.

My fifteen minutes happened in 1990, in a Nationals competition at the Berkeley Community Theatre. I was just hoping to make the semifinal cut of 40, but ended up placing third.

The first photo I ever sold was of Jim Karn (the Chris Sharma of the late 1980s) on Kings of Rap, at Smith Rock. I took it paparazzi-style, and I think it was in the 1989 Chouinard catalog.

Stone Dance, by Peter Brown, is a 1990s climbing film that takes a much harder and more thoughtful look at free soloing than the usual glorifications you hear. It’s one of my favorites. I was close with John Yablonski during the two years before his death, and I think the movie told a story about him that needed to be told. Yabo was a hero because he didn’t ignore his pain or try to hide it. He was really honest about his pain and its connection to his soloing. I think that’s something people who solo at least need to ponder.