If you’ve seen another photo of Norway’s famous Flemming’s Drop, there’s a good chance it was taken from the river right shore.
The left is an inhospitable, moss-covered bank and since the take-out is on the right, there’s little reason to ever ferry across.
But with the frightening determination we’ve come to expect from some kayaker-photographers, Ciarán Heurteau imagined a new angle and knew he needed to get the shot.
A French and Irish slalom paddler, Heurteau turned to creeking in 2009. A year later while nursing a shoulder injury, he spent more time with a camera than a kayak.
“I started reading books about photography, studying photo composition,” says Heurteau. He analyzed the works of Ansel Adams and decided he wanted to start shooting with more of a vision in mind. “I don’t want to take a photo for the sake of taking a photo,” he says, “but look at what is around, what I want and what I don’t want in the shot.”
When he saw a little ledge two meters down from the mossy left bank, he knew it would be perfect the perfect vantage point to shoot paddler and diver Sven Lämmler, along with the full scale of Flemming’s Falls.
“The only problem was accessing it,” says Heurteau. “It was just an overhanging rock with a lot of unstable moss on top of it.”
Praying the ledge would hold, he jumped down and found his footing to set up for the perfectly composed photo he’d imagined.
The result is this composite image, in which Lämmler, 15 minutes after running the falls by kayak, pulls off a front pike to branny to back tuck, for a total of three rotations before landing in the Rauma River.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Rapid magazine.
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