Circus Sarasota in Town Feb 12th thru 28th

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Greatest Show on earth!" Why?  I had the photo opportunity to photograph the Great Nik Wallenda, walking the high wire. Not just any high wire, how about one that was 600 feet long (that's two football fields, folks!) and 200 feet up in the air.  The high wire was stretched  between two buildings here in Sarasota, the One Watergate Tower condominium and the Ritz Carlton Hotel.  If you do not know, this event took place on Thursday, February 4, 2010 at approximately 9:18 AM.  (That was the time on my cellphone anyway).  So how do we do this one, again, getting the right credentials always helps and for me, my son-in-law, who works for Nik, was my credential.  But again, there was plenty of media there, shooting this from the ground up would have made for some amazing photos as well.  So let's take a look at that perspective, as you can tell we had a blue sky and bright sunlight.  The only way to shoot this would have been to have the sun behind you, shooting up into the sun would have only made a silhouette of your high wire walker, and the background would have been "blown out", unless of course that was what you wanted, but we will talk about that type of photography in another article.  It was that time of the morning, so the sun was at about a 45 degree angle to the ground which would have put a lot of light on Nik, if you were shooting with the sun behind you.  What kind of lens do you use?  I used a 55 to 200 mm zoom lens for my shot here.  My vantage point of course was the roof (I was on the One Watergate building) and as you can tell the sun is to my right just behind me.  This shot was taken with the above lens and I continued shooting until Nik finished his walk.  The ideal lens in this case would have been a 200 to 400 mm lens (next one on my shopping list).  You could pull Nik in at every step of the way filling your frame with this great high wire walker.  I shot this with an ASA of 100, a shutter speed of 160th of a second and a F/stop of 13 to get the greatest depth of field I could, with the horizon line being somewhat blurred.  This is really an amazing feat that does not happen to many times in ones life time but I was truly blessed, by not only my family connection (thanks again, Mike), but that I was able to have this happen in my town.  What a remarkable feat and great honor to be able to photograph from this point. Of course you always want to get the action coming to you, but for me I was thrilled just to have this vantage point, which really gave a different perspective.  The point here is watch where your light source is, after all light is what a photographer "paints" with to get some of the "Greatest Shots On Earth"!!!