Beth Wald is a Nikon Legend Behind the Lens.

For this renowned travel photographer, how you approach adventure photography is how you approach the journey itself.

The expedition is called AfricaQuest: seventeen trekkers on mountain bikes, six weeks, 1,500 miles from northern Kenya to Tanzania through Africa's Great Rift Valley.

Beth Wald, on assignment for Life magazine, is doing the photography. The journey starts in the Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world, and it's here, right at the beginning, that adventure blurs into hardship. "It was incredibly hot," Beth says, "and we had 120 flat tires the first day. I was thinking, uh oh, this is going to be bad."

But it wasn't. After that initial rough going it turned into a great adventure, even though you'd never mistake it for a stroll along the beach. "For my first trip to that part of the world," Beth says, "being on a bike was the best way to go. I got to meet many more people than travelers who are in air-conditioned vehicles passing through on their way to nature preserves."

That's the kind of adventure Beth likes—where people are the story, and the extreme part of the assignment is what she has to go through to get to the story.

In fact, Beth says the toughest parts of her assignments usually are the waiting around and the working out of the logistics.

And once in a while there's pure boredom.

On a climb of Cho Oyu in the Himalayas, on assignment for National Geographic Adventure magazine, storms pinned Beth and the other climbers in their tents for three days. "There are a limited number of interesting pictures you can take inside a tent," she says. "I did lots of abstract shots of tent walls."

Beth's interest in adventure photography, or as some call it, extreme photography, began with her interest in....well, adventure. She recalls canoe trips through the wilderness with her family in Minnesota every summer. After high school she drove the Alaska Highway and spent a summer on the Juneau ice fields, studying glaciology, meteorology, geology and botany with scientists and college students. In college she studied environmental science and took a research trip to the Himalayan mountains. Soon she began climbing and taking photographs of her climbing adventures. Fast forward some 15 years and Beth can look back on taking pictures while "dangling from ropes hanging from cliffs, frozen waterfalls and tropical trees; from the backs of horses, camels and donkeys; from helicopters, airplanes, kayaks, rafts, rickshaws and mountain bikes." She's photographed across the world for magazines like National Geographic, Outside and Travel and Leisure, as well as for corporate clients.