Walking the Tightrope

Right now I'm in Wanaka on my annual family ski vacation. Unfortunately, this early in the season, the snow up at Treble Cone is less than deep. So I took the time to go on a photo walk by the lakefront the other day. Conditions were dull, so I was out challenging myself to work with it. To be honest, I was struggling and in the cold conditions, was close to quitting several times.  I was just seeing cliche landscape stuff.





But I stuck with it. The sky cleared, the sun started to set, and I ran into this guy practicing his tightrope walking by the lake. He was trying to get some shots of himself in action, so I offered to shoot some frames for him, and he let me take some for myself. I got some cool golden hour silhouettes.



It was a reminder of two important things. The first is that making a connection with people always pays off when you're making pictures. The second is that sometimes you need to work it, and sometimes you need to relax and let a picture reveal itself to you, stick it out and wait for the right things to come together.  Sometimes you need to walk that tightrope.

In other news, it looks like I'm going to be doing one of the celebrity walks on the Hump Ridge Track next year. My experience of the track this year was brilliant and I'm really looking forward to leading another group of photographers to see what new pictures we can make there. Stay tuned.