I’ve climbed the TV antenna on the Empire State Building 4 times. Why, one might very legitimately ask. The old, “because its there” Everest rationale doesn’t really ring true, and I am certainly not an ironworker or an antenna engineer. I’m sure there are some motivations for this type of endeavor buried deep in my psyche, but this is far too short a story for an exploration thereof. It might be best to just say, “I’m a photographer,” and let it go at that. If you are interested enough in Lexar flash media cards to be actually reading this, you most likely have been impelled to do similarly wacky things, and you are just nodding your head knowingly right now, and don’t need any further explanation.

The specifics of the situation were that I was on assignment for the National Geographic, doing a story called “The Power of Light,” and I wanted to shoot the ultimate twist on the mundane task of switching a light bulb. Everybody’s done that, right? You just haven’t done it 1550’ in the air. The gentleman doing the switching is Tom Silliman of Electronics Research Inc. He has an engineering degree from Cornell, and over the course of time has found himself in what is definitely a niche industry, repairing and designing large scale antennas, most of which are found high in the air, like this one.

Making this climb is not easy. First off, you have to shut down a number of television stations in NYC. Going black for a TV station, even in the wee hours of the morning, is like Hal pulling his own plug. So the arranging is extremely difficult, which means when you schedule a climb, you always go, no matter what the weather. Up at the light, the atmospheric conditions could be very different than they are on 34th St. So even if its looking dismal at street level, you go.

Given the fact that I was raised Irish Catholic, a small contingent of dark rain clouds follows me wherever I go, so I lost my first 3 climbs to weather conditions. I was getting desperate, and running out of time. The National Geographic was holding 2 pages for the picture, long after their normal close, and that gets expensive. I finally got a weather break on the last possible day to shoot and get the picture in the magazine.

Needless to say, one travels light up there. I took an Nikon F100 film camera, and about 15 rolls of Kodak E100S. For lenses, I had a 16mm f2.8 Nikkor fisheye, and the new (at that time) Nikkor 14mm f2.8 rectilinear wide angle. I took one strobe, a Nikon SB 80. On the digital side, concerned about weight, I took a Nikon Coolpix 990 with a fisheye adaptor and 2 Lexar 256 mb (pretty sizable at the time) flash media cards. I had a couple of cinch sacks attached to my climbing harness, some gaffer tape, a headlamp, gloves, and I wore a flight suit with zippered pockets.

We began the climb at 3am, which is standard, and made our arduous way up inside the cage-like structure that is the foundation of the antenna. We reached the ice shield, which is about 1400’, still in darkness. It is here that the real climb begins. After donning a harness, you make your way up the outside of about 90’ of girder work, reaching a very small platform, which is your last rest spot. After that, you go up the final piece of steel for about 100’, reaching the light and the lightning rods around it at the very top. This last section is daunting. It is like climbing a very tall telephone pole 1500’ in the air that is swaying in the high winds.

Then we waited for light. At dawn, I began working like a mad person, not just to accommodate the rising sun, but also to get the hell off the antenna, as the TV station technicians are downstairs waiting to switch back on. There is so much microwave emitted by that antenna that it would fry your safety ropes. I prefer not to think about what it might do to your body.

We stayed up for about an hour, and I shot all my film and most of my flash cards. Obviously, mobility is a problem, as is distance from your subject. I had to put a foot on the antenna and push back at a 45 degree angle to get as far away from Tom as possible. I never used my flash, or the 16mm. I stayed with the 14mm, and the Coolpix. The digital camera approach was great as I was able to see the lcd and frame the shot while holding the camera as high in the air as I could.

I came down off the building, went to the lab, went to airport and went to the Geographic and my editor and I picked the select, and it shipped to the printer that day. Even though I was shooting for a magazine with months of lead time, in this instance, it was like shooting for a newspaper. Just as it is on many photographic assignments, the assignment came down to tenacity, a willingness to hang in there, and a break in the clouds.