Photographing kayakers and rafters on the Payette River in Boise, Idaho

I spent most of last week in lovely Boise, Idaho. Even though I make many trips out there, this was the first time that I had a chance to get outside of office buildings and actually see some of the surroundings that I have heard about.

We spent two days up at the Payette River, one day scouting locations for a Lexar video shoot and another full day shooting video and still images. Since we were doing more "fun stuff" than usual, I flew my son out with me to see what it is like to record 4 videos in 2 days. Most days ended with us eating dinner at 10pm or 11pm.

I shot this image on the first day as we were scouting out the rapids called "Staircase". This was one of only 4 rafts that we saw that evening, but I caught this image of them high-siding a rock and almost flipping.

Here is another raft going down Staircase with a canine passenger in the back seat. Notice that he is mid-air in this shot. :)

As we were driving back towards Boise, leaving the Payette River (just by a one store town called Banks), my son looked up and noticed the moon peaking over the mountains. It was really weird having the sunset at 10pm each night.

And then...on Wednesday we started shooting the video (using 7 cameras). We hired 6 experienced kayakers / rafters to tackle the Class 4 rapids for us.

If you look closely at the shot above, you will see one of the two Hi-Def waterproof video cameras (mounted to the front of the raft) that we used for the shoot. These are the very cool GoPro cameras. Amazingly, we did not lose either of the two cameras through the entire day of shooting.

These guys (and gal) put on a great show for us and had a blast hanging with us for the day. A little extra spending money and free beer at the end of the day!

We had them shoot the rapids, exit the river, walk their kayaks back up the road and do it all over again. I think we had them do this at least 3 times before we got what we wanted. They were all great sports.

This is one of my favorite shots from the day. I climbed down to the lower rocks along the edge of the river, crouched low to shoot right over the water (set the camera to focus at the upper portion of the frame) and captured the intensity of the water, with the kayakers about to tackle the rapids.

After we got all of our shots of them tackling the rapids, we went back up the river to the launch area to get some footage of them launching into the river. The more experienced boaters go down this very steep ramp and shoot into the water.

I shot this with the Sigma 15mm Fish Eye lens. A fun portrait shot to end the day.