Peter Dench discovers the process behind this dramatic award-winning capture
For the first time in its 17-year history, in November 2023 on stage at the Winner Award Ceremony in Sölden, Austria, a female photographer took the grand prize at Red Bull Illume Image Quest 2023 competition, the world’s largest imagery contest that celebrates adventure and action sports. Australian photographer Krystle Wright overwhelmed the 50-strong renowned judging panel with her shot of climber Angela Van Wiemeersch illuminated in a crack, deep within Long Canyon, Utah, United States. It also won the Innovation by MPB category.
On a warm spring day, as Krystle drove towards Coolum Cave, a regular climbing spot not far from her home in Australia, she had a lightning-bolt moment. ‘I’d been stewing on an idea for a couple of years, honestly, a very loose idea floating around my mind; it wasn’t anything to do with lighting a crack, if anything it was like how to light up climbing at night in a different way. My brain was circling the idea again and then it just hit me that no one else had ever lit up a crack climb,’ she explains.
Iconic location Krystle had been visiting Moab, Utah in the USA on and off for over a decade and knew that it would provide the right destination and conditions. ‘Moab is one of my special places where I feel so creative and it’s absolutely a world-class climbing destination. It’s an iconic red sandstone, there are few other places in the world that would match that terrain or that landscape,’ she adds. She arrived to execute her idea in June 2023 with a TV documentary crew in tow via a stint filming Storm Chasing in the American midwest.
Krystle teamed up with Angela, who she had worked with before and knew well as a strong crack climber. They rigged up two trial climbs before deciding that a third, the Seventh Serpent (5.11) crack, one of the classics of Long Canyon, had the right character. Over two afternoons in 103°F heat, Krystle gaffer-taped six battery packs (that had only arrived days before) hung in dry bags, to six 5m-long LED light strips.
As darkness encroached, she retreated to a crag 200-300m across the canyon, made herself comfortable on a rock, fixed her mirrorless Leica SL2 camera to a tripod and turned the APO-Vario-Elmarit-SL 90-280 f/2.8-4 lens to a focal length of 280mm. As the crack illuminated into life, at 1/30sec, f/4, ISO 3200, she thoughtfully captured her award-winning frame. ‘It did take a bit of shooting, not a lot, maybe 50 frames, it wasn’t like thousands. I don’t want to shoot and pray. I don’t want to shoot 20 frames a second. I’ve actually enjoyed the process
