Adventure cameraman Keith Partridge on life through a lens

The idea was to make a film that would take one of the Olympic gold medals awarded to the failed 1922 British Everest expedition members to the summit but the harsh environment on top of the world was almost too much for the hardened mountaineer.

When Partridge reached Base Camp he was struggling with the altitude and climbs to Camp 2 and Camp 3 left his team fearing the worst. In time he acclimatised and was elated to finally reach the summit. The hardest part was getting back down again while the weather and his body held out.

"You still need to have the mental capacity to get back down and that was me way beyond the limits on the descent from the South Col. From then on it was pretty horrendous, just living with the exhaustion, the dehydration and the ineffectiveness of your body to function. But still you're in an incredibly dangerous place but you have to somehow get down," he says.

The 48-year-old, who lives with his family in Lower Largo, Fife, has filmed BBC series such as Human Planet and the Bafta-winning documentary film Touching the Void but admits the descent from Everest was the toughest challenge of his life.

"You end up digging so deep, deeper than you ever thought you could. It resets the limits. You think, 'Well now I've done that I can deal with anything' and the simple answer is no you can't. But it does make you think, it's still not as hard as coming off Everest."

Partridge shares photographs of some of the stunning scenery he has witnessed along with a commentary of his daredevil exploits in a new book, The Adventure Game. From tales of socks filled with maggots and enduring trenchfoot in treks through rainforest jungles to the threat of frostbite in the Arctic and bivouacking thousands of feet up on a mountainside in whiteout conditions, the cameraman has endured it all to get the perfect shot.

He grew up in Norfolk, one of the flattest stretches of land in the British Isles, and got his first taste of the high life reaching the top of Ben Nevis with his dad and brother at the age of 10. From his teens he says he had a classic mountain apprenticeship, from hillwalking to scrambling, rock climbing, winter mountaineering and rock climbing.

Partridge joined the BBC as a trainee cameraman at 18, straight from school after failing his A-levels. He cut his teeth making programmes then six years later "walked off a cliff", as he described it: leaving a job for life to work freelance.

It is a wonder he made it to Everest at all after the recurrence of a previous injury almost brought his career as an adventure cameraman to an abrupt halt. It was a fall from an indoor climbing wall in the less than exotic surroundings of Newcastle that snapped his right ankle in half and left him with the grim prognosis that he might never walk properly again. With the determination that has taken him to some of the most inhospitable corners of the planet, Partridge was indeed walking again and within two years was filming a mountaineering documentary in the Cairngorms.

As time passed, wear and tear meant he was experiencing agonising pain again and a scan revealed the ankle fusion had failed. The only answer was to put metalwork through it to refuse the bones. This diagnosis would have floored most people but for Partridge, the only immediate problem was his next assignment - getting to the top of Everest in six weeks' time.

"It was just a question of getting up and down Everest. In that intervening period between the scans and results and me leaving for Everest, the surgeon got me in and put a massive cortisone injection deep into the joint to calm it down and that was it for a few months," he jauntily says as if describing a quick fix for a sore throat.

Last year Partridge had surgery to place titanium pins in his ankle and when I spoke to him recently he said he felt he had been given a new lease. He had returned the day before from filming a BBC project in Venezuela. "It was a fantastic expedition: rock climbing, caving and then just for kicks at the end we abseiled the Angel Falls." All in a day's work for the man who is described by naturalist and television presenter Steve Backshall as "the greatest adventure cameraman in the world".

Undoubtedly one of the highlights has been the camerawork on the Kevin Macdonald-directed Touching the Void, the true story of two climbers and their perilous journey up the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. Sitting in the audience at the premiere he says the audience reaction completely blew him away.

"From the second the film rolled until after the lights came on nobody moved and you could have heard a pin drop. People were stunned, it seemed they were unable to move. That was an incredible moment," he says.

In the Altai Mountains of Mongolia he had the rare opportunity to immerse himself in the local culture and the generations-old traditions that offered the chance to film a Kazak boy's rite of passage as he trained a golden eagle and went out on his first hunt.

"Not only to film that but also be a part of being welcomed into their lives was very special. You get wrapped up in the characters you are working with. They are the experts in the field, not us. Those guys live there, what do we know? For them to just accept us is very touching," says Partridge.

He managed to attach a camera to the eagle and was rewarded with unique images from a bird's eye view.

So what do you pack when you're going on an expedition to the forests and mountains of Guyana or the coast of Greenland?

"Keep it simple. The more things you take the more things there are to get in the way or for you to forget. In terms of the camera kit it's really about being streamlined but realising what luxuries you can afford to take with you to give you that extra bit of gloss on the filming or wow factor," he says.

"The camera technology is incredible these days and in one way it has made our lives in the field easier. The other issue is that viewer aspirations are that much higher. They expect brilliant quality pictures and to see camera flying up cliffs or around the place on drones. So we end up with a lot of toys and it's a question of where and when you deploy them or if it is practical."

Partridge says that to be a good adventure cameraman you need to have an understanding of fear. Working on instinct comes with experience and great adventures inevitably follow treading a very fine line.

One of his more unusual experiences was filming the opening sequence for the Paul WS Anderson movie AVP: Alien v Predator, about a team of archaeologists, including Trainspotting's Ewen Bremner, caught up in a battle between the two sci-fi legends in Antarctica.

It was a world away from working on a BBC documentary. "There was some hairy moments," he says in his typically light-hearted manner of the shoot above the Argentiere Glacier in the French Alps.

They included a camera falling off a tripod. "We always tie everything on so it didn't fall very far but it left myself and one of my safety guys swinging on the end of our ropes, holding this enormous Hollywood camera above a 500ft drop."

A few days later Partridge and another member of the crew were 120ft down an ice climb formed by the overflow pipes from a hydroelectric scheme when, with no notice, the automatic floodgates opened.

"Everything was encased in ice, the ropes were at least an inch thick in solid ice and nothing worked. The boys at the top had to chuck us another rope and they hauled us out."

It's just another day at the office for Partridge ...

The Adventure Game by Keith Partridge is published by Sandstone Press, priced £24.99. He will be appearing at Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 19.