Colin Prior was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1958. His proximity to the Scottish Highlands helped to shape his passion for wild places, although his journey into photography began not here but beneath the waves. In 1981, having created a portfolio of images in Scotland and the Red Sea, he went on to win best newcomer to underwater photography in an international competition, which changed the course of his life. Within a year, he had decided to pursue a career as a professional photographer and, in time, was being commissioned by design and advertising agencies for clients in the travel, lifestyle, and leisure sectors. This led to commissions for British Airways to produce their corporate calendars for four years, which took him to over fifty countries. During this period, he worked in a wide variety of habitats, which included tundra, deserts, mountains, rainforest, and savanna. Inevitably, he had a few scrapes—flying from Kunming to Perth in Australia with a fractured skull, having survived a collision with a tree in a Chinese taxi, and spending four weeks in Pakistan's Karakoram Mountains with a herniated disk—neither of which, he says, he would like to repeat. Colin's work has been published in nine books, most recently by Merrell, Fragile: Birds, Eggs, and Habitats, 2020, which was followed by The Karakoram: The Ice Mountain of Pakistan, 2021, the most glaciated region on the planet outside Antarctica and the Arctic. Prior's awards include the National Adventure Awards, Business Category Winner (2015), and the Scottish Award for Excellence in Mountain Culture (2020). He has been the subject of three BBC documentaries entitled Mountain Man, which focused on his work in Scotland and Pakistan.