Having undead spotters certainly encouraged Simon to go for it.

ah, yet again, the inevitable "rubbish" voter appears to try and drag down the average.
I wonder if they would be brave enough to actually justify their voting, or if they are only bitter when they have their annonymoty

Have you tinkered with the background colours in processing?

A little bit, but not as much as you might think. I took the photo with a flash, which meant simon was a bit more illuminated anyway, then I desaturated everything by somewhere around 20 or 30%, and used a layer mask to bring the colour back to the climber.
Normally I don't go for photoshopping images, so all my others are as they came out of the camera, but I was quite pleased with the results of this one

sorry scratch that. I was playing around with a load of photos, and this is one of the ones that did have some slightly more heavy editing. Everything bar the climber is desaturated by around 50%, then the whole image by another 15% or so, to stop the skin tones being too garish

I really don't like this photo. As you've said, it has very heavy editing and it shows (especially the focal distance, it seems very fake - although that kind of stuff seems popular on this site). I'd like to see the original. I have a feeling that it might be good.

I will upload the origional.
In that one the spotters in the background are quite distracting, and draw the eye away from the main climber.
Also I can't afford a 20mm f1.8 lense, else I would have just used that

I like the editing but maybe it would look better if there was slightly less contrast between the climber and the background.