I wiped off the raindrops of the lens and shouted over to Stepan to start walking the highline. It was early in the morning, in fact too early to enjoy this exercise of patience and hope. The weather was as grim as it can get, a storm was clearly approaching, and a thick layer of clouds was covering the sky at the horizon where I wished for the sun to pop up. I was half standing, half sliding a little sloping ledge twenty meters above the ground anchored to some interesting-looking bolts. Fifty meters on my right I could barely recognize the silhouette of Stepan, sitting on the line which was on the other side attached to the amazing pillar of Moai. I am not sure what was going through his mind but I felt sorry for him. Especially after frothing about this sunrise picture the night before at the campfire. We will have all the colors in the world, sunrises in Tassie are the best, it is going to be the most amazing thing we have ever seen.

Part of me felt cheated, ripped off, disappointed. The other one was trying to calm down and let it all flow. The world is not turning around your camera to make you happy every time you press the shutter you fool.

I looked at my mobile, it was 5:51, three minutes after the expected sunrise … splash … yet another atomized storm landed on the screen, everything was getting darker. Enough is enough … I shouted at Stepan and asked him if he could walk the line. It would be nice to get at least some shots after all this effort of setting up this spooky belay and abseiling at night. Let’s get it done real quick and bugger off for breakfast.

Stepan jumped on the line. Total pro, no lack of sleep or food will stop the Russians. I took a few less than mediocre snapshots. Fifty shades of gray would caption this scene quite well I thought. Stepan turned around and sat on the line. Then some kind of weird nuclear bomb blasted on the horizon. It was like if the Sun god and Rain god met up for a while deciding who is going to run the show today.  Storm on the left, sunrise sticking out its fingers on the right, in between the blood flooded battlefield.

I remember screaming at Stepan with excitement. He was already walking bathing in the sun … total pro! It was up to me not to fuck it up. I cannot really describe what was happening during the next few minutes. I was in some kind of photographic nirvana. Changing camera settings, composition, my position … it all felt like cruising through the cruxy moves of your project barely noticing what is going on, then you get lowered to the ground and start questioning if it really happened while grinning from ear to ear.

The light show finished as abruptly as it started, the god of rain won, and the world turn grey again. It made me wonder how many times I must have missed a similar show like this when I got lazy and called off a shoot when waking up into what looked like a desperate rainy morning.

Maybe Woody Allen was right that Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Technical details

The shot was taken with Canon 5D miii and 16-35 F2.8L lens at 16mm. I used a graduated neutral density filter (Lee 3 stops) to even out the exposure of the dark rocky foreground and the brighter sky. ISO was set to 3000 to maintain the shutter speed of at least 1/60s which was just enough to freeze Stepan’s movement. And one more little thing. I later found out that during those 15 minutes I took 200 photos! No matter how great the scene is, sometimes the little things like the body position or the light reflection on the waves make the difference. So, once you are in the zone, milk the scene, use different angles, try different compositions, experiment, take risks …   

Highliner Stepan Novikov (@stepan_cabage), the Moai, Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania.