In the breakfast room at the 230-year-old Hotel Rosenlaui, I take a few minutes to sip a cappuccino and scribble thoughts in a notebook while we wait for the morning sun to pop over the Engelhörner, a row of jagged limestone peaks soaring 4,700 ft above our chairs. I feel like I’m getting away with something, stealing a moment of leisure just before another steep 2,000-foot approach hike. My friend Dan convinced me to come here this morning with him and Simon – just for fun, not for a photo or magazine story this time. It’s one of the few days in Switzerland’s rainy 2014 summer in which the sun will shine all day. We had just returned from a climbing trip the night before, after a five-hour drive in a packed car careening around Switzerland’s windy mountain roads, and I was exhausted; but when Dan tells you something is going to be great, it’s hard to say no.

Dan Patitucci is one half of PatitucciPhoto, with his wife, Janine Patitucci. They’re based in Interlaken, Switzerland, a jumping-off point for adventures in one of the most inspiring mountain landscapes on Earth. They’ve shot photos all over the world, but some of their most recognisable work has come from their backyard – a few hours’ drive from Interlaken, or in the Dolomites, where they lived for five years.

Dan and Janine are both photographers – that is, they both make beautiful images with their own cameras – but in much of their work, they only pack one camera body and Dan presses the shutter most of the time. If PatitucciPhoto is a car, Dan is the engine: finding inspiring locations, dreaming up the trips, selling the concepts to magazines and companies, and leading the group on the trail. Janine is everything else that keeps the car on the road: managing the production aspects of setting up shots in the field and making sure everything is perfect, executing trip logistics, and putting in marathon sessions of photo editing once the trip is over – these days, as important a part of making images as the actual camera work.

I have spent a total of almost two months with the Patituccis over three trips to Europe, in France, Italy, and Switzerland, accompanying them on climbing and trekking trips for magazine stories. I’ve even acted as a model for shoots in a pinch. The one thing I’ve learned in those trips is that any situation can be an opportunity for a shot that might appear in the pages of a magazine – from a short trail run during which Dan and Janine are only carrying a small point-and-shoot camera, to a seven-day hut-to-hut trip in the Alps, to month-long expeditions in the Himalaya.

Our day in the Engelhörner is no different. Despite the inertia of wanting to order another cappuccino and keep writing in my notebook, Dan, Simon and I pack up and start up the approach trail to find a climb. Four pitches of steep limestone later, we top out and Dan fires off a few shots from the summit. Six months later, I find the spring catalogue for Outdoor Research in my mailbox, and on page seven, Dan’s photo of Simon from our day in the Engelhörner.