Following on from his successful SportCLIMBING+ book, this is Adrian Berry’s new book about performance trad climbing. From making your first steps onto a trad route, to refining your mental approach in order to bag a top-level onsight, this book covers it all. Adrian ran top-quality coaching courses with PlanetFear for years, and now runs his own performance coaching company Positive Climbing.

Producing the photos for this book was a mammoth effort, but it was well worth it - there are over 30 of my images used in the book, as well as my very first appearance in front of the lens! The reproduction quality is superb.

Visit the: ROCKFAX TradCLIMBING+ photo gallery

After many months of development, we’ve just gone live with a major new addition to the ROCKFAX site. As Alan James posts on UKClimbing:

“You can now create a blog on the ROCKFAX site to record your climbing exploits, thoughts and ideas. We have added a versatile and extensive system to the site which allows anyone to set up a blog.

Write about your experiences, produce a topo for your local crag, have a rant about top-roping, or just tell us about your great climbing weekend like Mick did here -
http://blog.rockfax.com/mick-ryan/2007/10/08/hello-world/”

The blogging system we use is a heavily customised version of WordPress - one of the most popular blogging systems in the world. It supports all the usual features such as spell checking on your blogs, photo uploads, feeds, blogrolls, etc. Initially we’ve made it look very similar to the rest of the ROCKFAX site, but in the future we may let users ‘theme’ their own blog to give it whatever design they want.

Our new rock climbing photography site has hundreds of top-quality images that can be ordered as large-format prints by the general public. We also provide powerful searching of our photographic catalogue for magazine and book editors who need to find specific images with the minimum of fuss.

Please have a good look around and try out all the features of the site, and email me if you find any problems, or if you have any suggestions on how to improve the site.

I’ll be adding plenty of additional galleries over the next few months - eventually there will be several thousand photos online.

Many thanks!
Nick Smith, Webmaster

“These innovative guidebooks present a handy and low cost introduction to the brilliant climbing found in the eastern Peak. Each pocket-sized book focuses on routes from Mod to HVS and has over 500 climbs on both grit and limestone.”

The compact nature of the guides meant that there wasn’t much scope for action photos, but I was very pleased to get my first guidebook cover shot - Anna climbing Valkyrie at Froggatt, as well as a handful of other good photographs. I particularly like the shot of Dan climbing at Yarncliffe - he has moaned in the past that I take photos where he is the belayer instead of the climber! grin

Visit the: ROCKFAX Pokketz photo gallery

We’ve just completed upgrading the ROCKFAX website to use XHTML/CSS industry standards. Previously the site, which has over 24,000 pages, used a combination of HTML v4 tags, TABLEs layout and some very basic CSS. All web browsers produced in the last 10 years support CSS and it was finally time to ditch all of those old ‘FONT SIZE=2‘ HTML tags! The new site has been tested to be compatible with a large number of web browsers running on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

The upgrade brings a number of benefits to the end user, including:

• Faster page download times
• Ease of printing pages
• Better page layout on handheld devices

Benefits to the site owner include:

• Automated validation of website code to find formatting errors
• Ease of future redesigns of layout, colours, etc
• Easier to maintain content without having to edit HTML tags
• Lower site bandwidth bills
• More flexible layout options than with just HTML TABLEs

As we’ve kept the same site design and colours, users shouldn’t notice any visible changes in the redesign, just a better site running “under the bonnet”.

Adrian Berry’s book about performance sport climbing provides invaluable information to the beginner and expert alike. From making your first steps onto a sport route, to refining your mental approach in order to bag a top-level onsight, this book covers it all. Adrian ran top-quality coaching courses with PlanetFear for years, and now runs his own performance coaching company Positive Climbing.

There are 18 of my photos in the book - everywhere from Mexico to Sardinia, Kalymnos to the Peak District, and from F5+ to F8c!

Visit the: ROCKFAX SportCLIMBING+ photo gallery

An update to the award-winning 2001 guidebook, Peak Gritstone East (possibly the most popular guidebook in the world), this new edition has a host of improvements as well as including 900 more climbs. This is the guidebook that practically lives in my rucksack, and there is hardly a single page in it that I don’t have routes ticked or notes scribbed on!

Many thanks to all the climbers who came out to the crag especially for me to photograph them in the run-up to publication of this guide - sadly not everyone can get in the book, but I’ll be putting the photos that didn’t make it in up on Climbers.net as a separate gallery.

Visit the: ROCKFAX Eastern Grit photo gallery