Loel, Paul & Jon, originally uploaded by Ben Grubb.

Well, first off – MERRY CHRISTMAS (Sorry it’s late) and HAPPY NEW YEAR! I hope you’ve all had a lovely festive period.

I’ve been making slow, but steady progress on all my Wintersleep photos – I don’t think I really have the slickest workflow on these, but I’m getting there and really enjoying reliving the memories of the fantastic shows. I can’t wait for them to (hopefully) return in February.

Distension (our film about Climbing in Fontainebleau from earlier this year, for those that don’t know) is now all done and dusted and awaiting it’s star studded premier on December 29th. As is customary for such a production, full artwork has been created by yours truly and I thought this would be a fitting place to unveil it.

Inspiration for the look/theme of the artwork was taken quite heavily from BigUp Productions’ latest feature length epic, Dosage 5. Those guys truly know how to put together a stunning climbing film!

Cathedral by Night, originally uploaded by Ben Grubb.

I’ve had a really cool day and a bit in Berlin – what a great city! I can’t wait to come back. There’s a real mix of old and new (as I’ve tried too capture in this shot). There’s certainly a lot to explore…

Soundcheck

Originally uploaded by Ben Grubb

Greetings from Hamburg! The tour has been going pretty well so far – I’ve spent a lot of time on trains, but it’s definitely been worth it. Yesterday was a “day off” (i.e. no show that night) but up until then its been gigs every night. Cologne (which was the last one I was at) was fantastic! They really mixed the setlist up from previous nights which was a nice surprise (see below).

Nerves Normal… made an appearance, and was a 15 minute minute marathon which sounded superb! I hope they keep that one in for either tonight or Berlin. Avalanche was a nice touch as was new song Baltic which is pretty catchy too, especially the bass.

Mark and I were in the venue at 5, and after a few moves around we were able to set up in this little attic at the back, above the soundboard. There was a hatch in the wall which gave a great view of the stage (see photo). We set up a stationary camera and the mics up there and sat and watched the guys soundcheck – pretty cool! That’s not something I’ve ever been able to do before. Unsurprisingly, I took a ton of photos which will no doubt make their way onto flickr pretty soon.

Cologne Setlist:

Drunk on Aluminum
Archeologists
Astronaught
Dead Letter & The Infinite Yes
Murderer
Weighty Ghost
Avalanche
Oblivion
Laser Beams
Baltic
Nerves Normal, Breath Normal
Miasmal Smoke & he Yellow Bellied Freaks

Tim, originally uploaded by Ben Grubb.

We’re off to Amsterdam today to see Wintersleep! It’s very exciting. After Amsterdam, I’m off into Germany for a few more shows, before one final one in London again on the 16th. Busy, busy!

Here’s a shot from their show in 229 in London the other night. There’s a few more on flickr.

Graveyard, originally uploaded by Ben Grubb.

Another HDR experiment created using a single RAW file, and Photomatix. Pretty successful I thought.

Side pulls, originally uploaded by Ben Grubb.

On Sunday, I returned home from a rather sunny yet cold trip to the Peak District. We went to check out some of the fantastic bouldering up there, and weren’t to be disappointed. It was an intensely chilly weekend, with the high on Saturday (our main climbing day) being a staggering 1 degree! This made for some “interesting” top outs, as many of the boulders remained covered in ice and frost throughout the day, despite the sun being out.

The weather on the whole was stunning though, and we got a lot of climbing in and I managed to get some decent photos of both us climbing and of the landscape. This trip did go a long way to highlighting my inadequacies af climbing outdoors! I need to get a lot of practice of that in before our trip to America next year!