The Ultimate Guide to Digital Photography in the Mountains

What I don't bring

• Tripod: Even though I own a very nice carbon fiber tripod for hiking, I always leave it home for actual climbing. I know that except at sunrise and sunset, light will be strong enough for me to shoot at optimal aperture and ISO with very comfortable shutter speeds. It would only be really usable in camps anyway, as it is complicated and time-consuming to set up. And finally, even carbon fiber weighs something, and with a reasonable ballhead, it probably is a minimum of 1.5 to 2kgs. For low-light shooting, I simply bump the ISO and for night photography use rocks or makeshift platform (a sturdy snow pile with a crampon on top works great). So far, I have never found myself in a situation where no tripod meant no shot.
• Flash: For it to look interesting, one would have to take the flash head off camera, which is simply too complicated to do while climbing. Managing batteries would also be a nightmare (I can barely do it for a dayshoot from home...). And of course forget about light modifiers. Finally, mountain light is very unique, and I want to exploit that fully.
• Filters: Besides the UV that are permanently on, I don't take anything. Screwing and unscrewing very thin things with big gloves isn't very fun, and they are likely to be dropped at the worst moment. The only one that could be really useful would be a grad ND, but they are even more of a pain to use and set up than regular screw-ons. I use HDR instead in situations that would require them (see "Exposure").
• Exotic lenses: As much as I like exploring new effects and trying new things, the weight requirements limit what I am willing to fool around with. That being said, I will probably carry an ultra wide-angle on an easy climb one of these days, as I think it could create some very interesting things.

Managing your resources

With digital, there are two basic resources that you need to take care of: memory space and battery life. Since most climbing expeditions span several days (or weeks for the most extreme ones), and mountains usually don't come pre-equipped with power outlets in campsites, one has to be careful and plan ahead.

Memory.

This is the easy one.

There are two basic options: either buy enough memory cards to last you the whole trip, or get a hard drive that you can download pictures onto. Though weight would be lower with the first choice, it has many disadvantages: it is more expensive, cards will likely not be of the highest possible performance, and having dozens of cards could easily lead to confusion. But most importantly, photos will only be in one single location, a tiny piece of plastic that has a tendency to easily get lost or corrupted.

For those reasons, I carry two hard drives and download all my pictures on both every day (usually in the tent, at night), then format the card immediately. I try to keep the drives in separate locations, for instance one in the photo bag and the other one in the backpack, in case that, well, shit happens. The Sano Hyperdrives that I use have a pretty impressive autonomy and the UDMA version can probably backup 100GB before I would start worrying about its battery (the official specifications give 250GB per charge), i.e. more than I will shoot in any reasonable trip. Just for safety, I also bring a plastic casing in which I can put the LR6 batteries of my headlamp to be used as an external power source.

I only carry 10GB in cards, with the high performance Lexar UDMA 133x 4GB being my workhorse. Since I rarely shoot more than 4GB a day (that's about 300 RAW files on the D90), I have a big safety margin. This also means that I can leave the hard drives without remorse for summit days.

Batteries

Meet the biggest problem with climbing photography. The issue is that mountains tend to be pretty damn cold, and that batteries don't like that. At all. Their capacity drops to a fraction of what they usually are. The good news being that as soon as they are warmed up, they go back to full capacity.

Summit pushes tend to happen at the end of a trip, so one needs to be very careful in order not to suddenly be powerless (pun intended) when the truly great photo opportunities finally arise. In order to avoid that, there are several possible strategies.

Note: I assume having two batteries, which is a minimum for any expedition. It is easy to adapt to more.

• The dumb strategy is to deplete the first battery entirely, then switch and repeat. The only advantage is that you don't have to think about it at all, but there is a good chance that you will find yourself without power by the end of the climb. Even if you are careful to have capacity left for the summit, you are at the mercy of cold and this is a recipe for missing shots.
• A variant is to swap batteries regularly so as to have them roughly at the same capacity. When wanting to shoot in cold weather, keep one close to your body, where it's warm, and the other in camera. Once the capacity of the cold one drops below a certain level, swap them and keep shooting. The advantage is that you are guaranteed to always have a warm battery. The inconvenient is that you still need to be careful about having enough power left for the summit, and also that it's a pain to switch batteries with gloves on (whoever designed the door for the battery compartment on Nikon DSLR obviously wasn't thinking about climbers).
• Finally, my favorite option relies on the observation that most of the shooting happens while in camps (because of having more time, no distractions from climbing and often good light), but that most of the good pictures are taken while doing actual climbing. I then reserve one the batteries for climbing days (and especially summit pushes) and use the other exclusively for shooting from campsites. This way, I am more or less guaranteed a near-full charge on summit day and when the photography really counts. On the down side, I may have to limit my campsite photography, and if extremely cold when climbing, I may run into power troubles. In case this happens, I will swap batteries with the other one, hopefully not too depleted, only long enough for the first one to warm up a bit.