Monday, February 1, 2010

Photo topos

The web version of the bouldering guide has very few photo topos ie. photos of cliff or boulders with the lines of problems superimposed on them. There were a few reasons for that firstly if the guide was printed in low definition black and white on an ordinary printed most topos would be unreadable, secondly they take up a lot of space and the guide would be huge if they where used extensively, thirdly they tend to be more suited to steep cliff band type climbing rather than rounded boulders (ie. it could take 4 or 5 photos to show all aspects of one boulder) and we don't have much of that kind of thing and fourthly I don't really like them.

Having said all that I think there might be some in the new guide. Here's one of the Second boulder on Three Rock, I think it looks smart enough and shows the lines pretty well. What do people think? Please comment.

8 comments:

  1. It does the job. Easy to read and easy to follow the lines. In an area with lots of blocs it helps in identifying the problems. Are you going to have them in colour?. In some guides the black and white images can be difficult to read.

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  2. Some guides i have seen use a coloured line to denote the approx grade to work with the description - e.g. green is up to 6A, yellow is 6A+ - 7A and red is harder than 7A+...if you're going with colour printing this may work?

    matt

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  3. I like it in moderation, I'm not overly keen on the rocofax idea of doing it for every line it almost takes the fun out. It's great for refernce for getting you bearings though.

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  4. I would be new to bouldering and I can take the point that if all the lines are up it could take some of the fun out, but for me it would help to get my bearings.
    How about having proper topos of the classics and use them to show where the other problems are.

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  5. Michael I think they would have to be in color to work well.
    Matthew - colored lines might be worth a try my worry would be that it might look a bit busy. But I will give it a go.

    All things in moderation Tim.

    Simon my plan at the moment is have loads of photos of problems in the guide to help ID problems and relate them to the over head maps.

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  6. Pefect like this, must be colour, does anyone know the grade of these traverses ??

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  7. I reckon the high traverse is about 5+/6a and the low one is about 6a+/6b. High is more sustained but doesn't have any hard moves. The low is quite easy apart from a powerful move towards the end.

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