Drill and chill is a festival near Banja Luka in Bosnia that gathers climbing and highlining community from all over the world. This year I was invited to tell a story through my photographs, and to have some fun myself. With climbing I am obviously very familiar but highlining is something totally new for me,  with my experience limited only to 15 meters on the ground, just standing up on those monster lines seemed impossible. I didn’t actually bother much, rather focused on the photographs.

The festival’s campsite was on a plateau above the river Vrbas canyon, so the approach to cliffs was within 10 minutes. There were 6 highlines set up, from 40m to 180m but as I said before, I had no chance on any of them 🙂People who I would never usually take seriously walk them with ease, before breakfast! Amazing! But I guess in order to excel this art you really need to commit to this nomadic venture of visiting as many festivals and moving from one to another. Most of my climbing friends are weekend warriors, training in the gym during the week and hitting the crags at weekend, so seeing people living in their vans was something new and interesting for me.

The original idea of the festival was to clean and bolt routes for climbing, the highlining came along naturally due to the amazing features of the canyon. Climbing itself offers bolted routes in all difficulties, usually a few pitches with many projects still undone so anyone looking for fresh routes should consider it.

This was the first time to test my new Nikon D750, I’ve been weighing it against the new D850 but just couldn’t justify the price difference. For my needs it does it all, lightweight with excellent performance, and for the deal I got it for it was a no-brainer.

Take a look at my photos!