An ongoing project has taken her to the Patagonia region of South America. "I'd originally gone down there to cover trekking and mountaineering. I've always loved the horse and cowboy image, and I'd see the gauchos out in the middle of nowhere on their horses, herding and riding, and I became curious about what their life was like. I had a lot of contacts in the area, and I got the names of a few ranches and met the owners and asked if I could just hang out and take photographs."

Many of the photos Beth has taken in the region were shot in black and white. Beth feels that black and white is more in keeping with the kind of mythical feeling she has about the gauchos and their lives. "I don't look at what I'm doing as a documentary project. It's much more of a romantic view, and I'm putting together a book with quotes from literature and poetry about the gaucho culture and the way they fit into literature. They seem as if they were living in a place isolated from the flow of time."

When it comes to adventure photography, photographic technique comes down to making everything as automatic and second nature as possible. "Knowing your equipment really well is important. You don't have a lot of time to set things up.

"One thing I've learned in the last year is to be more in the middle of the action, to get really close using wide-angle lenses, and in addition to beautiful scenic shots, to get more of the essence of what the people are experiencing. It's similar to sports documentary photography—trying to show the humanity of the people and the effort it takes for them to accomplish what they set out to do."

How you approach adventure photography is how you approach the journey itself. "Plan as much as you can ahead of time. Plan for as many contingencies as you can think of. And then just go ahead and do it, knowing it's never going to be exactly as you think it will be."

An important factor for Beth is to capture the atmosphere of what's going on around the main subject. "There's the story you're working on, but then there's the outside story of the people you're with and the people in the region. I know that there are a lot of talented photographers who can get into a lot of places, but the people who hire me know that I can do not only the pretty pictures of the mountains, but that I can get deeper into the story."

For the future though, Beth wouldn't mind some stories that don't involve extreme locations and events. "It's nice to check into a hotel every now and then."