Paul McCartney Atop The Ed Sullivan Theater

When Popular Photography's technical editor Philip Ryan found out that Paul McCartney was getting ready to play a short set of songs, within the next hour, atop the Marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater for his performance on the Late Show with David Letterman, he sprang into action. From his drawer, Philip grabbed a Sony A900 already outfitted with the 70-400mm f/4-5.6 G-series lens under review for the September issue. He loaded the camera with a 16GB Sandisk Extreme IV card and ran out the door mumbling thanks that the battery was fully charged.

Since he had no press pass, and had no time to arrange for one, he had to weave his way through the massive crowd of people to find a decent vantage point from which to shoot. As the performance progressed, he continued to jockey for better positioning, even going as far as to stand on top of a fire-hydrant-like pipe and bracing his elbows on a traffic-light control box. Thankfully, there was a lot of natural daylight, the A900 keeps noise reasonably under control at ISO 1600 and below, and the camera's sensor-shifting image stabilization gave enough leeway to not have to worry too much about too-slow a shutter speed.

When Philip got back to the office, he was still in awe from a once-in-a-lifetime experience and brought with him a batch of images from which we culled the nine in this slideshow and one more to accompany the lens test in the magazine. In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that almost all the images in this slideshow have been cropped-in some cases quite severely. Some of the images aren't quite perfect, technically speaking, but in those cases we included them because we thought they're cool anyway.

Check out all the images from the show here.