Climbing and photograpy is a new thing most climbers just take snap shots and don't really want to spend the time to set up a good pic. In climbing there are alot of pros and cons. If you do alot of winter climbing bring a manunal cammra there for it will not freeze up on you, on been there done that. If you want excellent pictures get a meduim format but very heavy and takes a lot of time. the automatic cammars are great but if you are just getting started you tend not to see or understand how the cammra is seeing. I used to use fm10 by nikion really light and not very durrable. but works great. one problem with it is that you have to take very good care of it and you just cant through your pack around every where. as for lens I take three 28, 50 and 100 fixed legths by doing so you get beter
pictures. I right now I use a pentax k1000 do to fact that my main cammra was stolen its a great climbing cammra too.
Though I would sugest a range finder it will take pictures almost as good as a meduim format but it takes along time maunal to use. A question you might want to ask you self is do you want quality over quantity?