Galen Rowell, who has died aged 61, with his wife Barbara in a plane crash in California, was the most famous outdoor photographer in the world, regularly shooting features for National Geographic during a life spent travelling in remote countries around the world.
Wilderness shapes the American consciousness in ways few Britons appreciate, and Rowell was at the heart of that tradition. It also gave him a market to exploit. His father, a college professor, and mother, a concert cellist, took him camping in the Sierras before Rowell could walk, and his early engagement with wild places seems to have shaped his psychology for the rest of his life.
By the age of 10 he was climbing mountains on Sierra Club outings, the conservation organisation founded in 1892 by John Muir and shaped by Ansel Adams. He remained a staunch supporter for the rest of his life.
By 16 he had started doing roped climbs on the vast granite cliffs of Yosemite, adding over a hundred new climbs there and in the Sierras during the 1960s and 70s. It was his experiences there that gave him his break as a photographer. Rowell dropped out of college at Berkeley and worked instead as a mechanic to fund his climbing.
While taking photographs to show his family and non-climbing friends what he was up to on the big walls of Yosemite, he became increasingly intrigued by the process of forming an image, and inspired by Adams's vision of Yosemite. While Adams maintained distance and control of his images, Rowell, as a climber, knew the cliffs intimately, and his early pictures have an intensity which contrasted with his illustrious predecessor.
Within a year of turning professional, in 1972, he was shooting pictures of Yosemite pioneer Warren Harding for National Geographic. The assignment, at a time when there were fewer skilled climbing photographers, led to a rush of work all over the world for many of the top American magazines.
Rowell eventually visited all seven continents, producing a substantial portfolio reproduced in articles and books of both polar regions, the Himalayas - in particular Tibet - and South America.
In the early 1980s, after publishing books about his years in Yosemite and the impact of tourism in Nepal and other Himalayan countries, Rowell was asked by Robert Redford to guide him on a trip to Nepal. Their friendship led to an exhibition of Rowell's work on 5th Avenue in New York, a project which was published in his greatest book, Mountain Light, which captured the essence of his philosophy.
Rowell turned his back on the large-format cameras of his landscape contemporaries, preferring the immediacy of the 35mm camera. He liked to have the latest equipment and was quick to take advantage of graduated filters, but he would toss his camera in a rucksack, wrapped in his bedding roll, rather than get too hung up on the technology.
For him, experiencing landscapes as close up as possible was at the centre of his work. He spent long periods in the field looking for the right combination of light and form. This devotion reached its apotheosis just outside Lhasa in 1981, when a rainbow touched the roof of the Dalai Lama's Potala Palace, Rowell's most famous image. Rowell had to race across the valley to align the shot correctly, quite literally chasing a rainbow.
These moments of sublimity, almost always shot in perfect light, drifted into sentimentalism at times, especially in his later work. Rowell was a populist, on a mission to share his technical insight with amateur photographers and determined to share an idealised vision of the American landscape in particular. While British photographers like Fay Godwin present a more equivocal view and work in less than perfect light, Rowell wanted simply to inspire and it made his work commercially successful.
This process was accelerated after he married his second wife, Barbara, at the time a communications director. She took over the commercial side of Rowell's ever-expanding archive, giving him his pre-eminent position in outdoor photography. Later, she developed her own photographic career alongside his, while learning to fly and to speak Spanish, both useful skills in the preparation of her first book, an account of a journey through Latin America due for publication at the time of her death.
Rowell is survived by two children from his first marriage.
· Galen Rowell, photographer, born August 23 1940, died August 11 2002
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