When the Straight reaches adventure photographer Krystle Wright, she’s quite fittingly on a ski lift, swinging high above a Utah mountain. Just a few days earlier, she was sailing the Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica, teaching a three-week course aboard the ship National Geographic Orion.

“They call it the Drake Shake, and that’s pretty self-explanatory,” she says with a laugh. “It was rough.”

Considering the endless travelling she’s done over the course of her career, you know it must have been a wild ride. Shooting everywhere from the frozen mountaintops of Baffin Island to the sperm-whale-swarmed depths off the Azores Islands, the Australian artist lives out of a duffle bag while making a concerted effort to stay anywhere but hotel rooms.

“For the most part, I’m on friends’ couches or camping out,” she says before coming here for the Vancouver Mountain Film Festival. “And, honestly, I prefer that. It gives me a chance to catch up with friends.”

Getting to know her subjects is part of the magic behind her outdoor-sports photography. There is the lone free diver, shot from the depths of the cobalt Fijian ocean as he pushes toward the surface light; the BASE jumper plunging headfirst off a towering crag toward an emerald-green valley in Australia’s Blue Mountains; and the highliner teetering on a tightrope slung between the arms of a red Utah rock arch, somehow lensed from above. In each case, Wright is driven to find a fresh perspective on her epic shots of humans in nature.

When you see photos like the overhead look at a paraglider bobbing above a dangerously jagged ridge in Pakistan’s snowcapped Rakaposhi mountains, your first reaction is usually “What is that person doing?” The inevitable next thought is “Wait. How did the photographer get this shot?”

The answer is that Wright is often right there with her subjects.

One of her most stunning images captures a climber at sunset, clinging to the side of Tasmania’s Totem Pole, a narrow sea stack that stands like a craggy pillar amid crashing waves. The iconic landmark has been shot thousands of times, so Wright knew she wanted to shoot it in a different way. And that meant dangling from a Tyrolean traverse—a ziplinelike rope slung between two rock towers on either side of the stack—with a buckle the only thing between her and the sea raging far below. (An airborne drone had to provide the flash; you can watch her entire journey in Red Bull TV’s online Breaking the Day video series.) “It took three days to set up the Tyrolean, with a whole crew, and then I had to hang out halfway to the middle to get this one shot,” says Wright, who had to swim through the surging water to get to the opposite face. “That gives you a pretty good idea of the lengths I’ll go to. Three fucking days for that!

“I feel some photographers get a bit lazy,” she adds. “The great thing about having this natural interest is I want to be part of the adventure too. I’m trying to tell a story about what that athlete is doing. Hopefully, it’s giving the viewer an idea of what it’s like for the adventurer to be climbing the Totem Pole.”

For Wright, who is also a landscape photographer, the scenery is as much of a character in her shots as the tiny humans tackling it. “I think of it as landscape photography with action figures,” as she puts it.

Wright credits her love of the wild outdoors to growing up amid the natural beauty of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, where she was an avid surfer and embraced every sport she could find. A gig in newspaper and sports photography in Sydney led to her interest in shooting extreme sports.

Wright stays inspired by varying the outdoor adventures she lenses—a rarity in her field.

“I never wanted to be pigeonholed into one or two sports. I do free diving, rock climbing, mountain climbing,” she says. “And each time I come back to one of them I say, ‘Oh, I fucking missed this!’ Like, I’ve fallen in love with freediving again. I love being in the deep blue.”

Wright is willing to go to extremes in her endless, obsessive quest for the perfect shot, and as you might have guessed, she has the battle scars to prove it. Famously, she broke her front teeth during a mountain-biking trip to China, and, in her worst accident, her paraglider ran into boulders in remote Pakistan, requiring a seven-hour drive to hospital. It left her with internal bruising, tendon damage, two fractures, and 10 stitches above her eye.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise Wright’s talk here at the fest (where she’s also screening her short film “Chasing Monsters”, about storm-chasing photographer Nick Moir) is called Risk Taking as a Modern Creative.

But ask her about the fear factor in her work, and it sounds like the stress of her competitive field often outweighs the perils of, say, suspending yourself by a rope high over a turbulent ocean.

“I don’t know where my next paycheque is going to be,” says Wright. “There’s definitely a very big risk to do this freelance lifestyle. I have no Plan B.”

The Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival presents Krystle Wright at the Rio Theatre next Wednesday (February 27).