In the utter darkness of midnight, stage lighting blinded Blair Trotman as he launched a Wave Sport Recon off the edge of the visible earth, plunging into the abyss 60 feet below the lip of Sutherland Falls. Then, from behind a pile of high-end camera equipment, someone told Trotman it was time for take two. And then three.
“Blair was an absolute trooper and hit the falls three times that night to ensure we got the shots we were looking for,” says Steve Shannon, who snapped this photo while tagging along on a video shoot for Dark Water, a short film by Kelsey Thompson.
The lights, dragged to the river by a crew of Revelstoke locals, gave the falls a different feel than the sunlight that lit Trotman’s practice runs earlier that day. It was hardly enough for Shannon to capture the midnight descent.
“This was primarily a shoot for Kelsey, so I was limited to shooting with the available light from his filming lights. This was extremely challenging, as you don’t need as bright of lights for shooting video as you do for capturing still images. I had to push my equipment to the absolute limits.”
He joined Trotman in the water for a moment, though not on purpose. “There were a lot of extra people milling around, getting in the way of shots and making things fairly difficult,” says Shannon. “I ended up exploring alternate angles by paddling to the other side of Blanket Creek…let’s just say I got a little wet.”
Around 1 a.m., as one of the most unique shoots of his career was wrapping up, Shannon grabbed this shot of Trotman, standing below the falls “eyeing up the monster in the dark he had just destroyed.” EMMA DRUDGE
This article was first published in the Spring 2014 issue of Rapid Magazine. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions, or browse the archives.
