The nice little trickle before the water was released.
A real highlight of the day was watching the water rapidly fill the river.
Studying the behavior of many boats made it possible to capture one at the peak moment as at seemed to fly through the rapids. Gaussian blur added to background to help isolate the boat and paddlers.
This is the guide!!! Everyone else was already in the water.
1/4 sec with a lot of camera shake
Boats caught in the hydraulic resulted in lots of swimming!! as this crew learned!!
This is the boat from the previous image that got caught in the hydraulic. Flash fill helped these images a lot.
Image captured at 0.8 sec. Too slow for anything but this kind of blurred image.
1/25 sec...this was a good shutter speed for some detail with lots of surrounding blur. This is pretty much what I was trying to acheive.
0.4 sec...interesting but probably not useable
Playing around with slower shutter speeds. Mostly luck if you get anything useful. At 1/8 sec, this was about as slow as I could get identifiable images.
1/13 sec...too much blur but I liked the impact of the water against the one guy in the front of the image.
A very diverse group...both paddlers and guides. Never saw a boat with a female guide that didn't make it through successfully.
The guides are much better at staying with the boat than are the guests. Experience I guess.
Only the guide is in reasonable focus but I chose this image for her intensity in directing her paddlers through the rapids.
Some pretty rough action in the deeper holes.
The river bank quickly filled with boats and paddlers taking a break at the end of their ride or before heading further downriver.
Colorful boats made for many still life opps.
Some boats seemed to be swallowed by the waves only to come out the other side in a few seconds and continue downriver.
River rescues were the order of the day.
Some had to ride the waves for a while before being rescued. On unusual occasions there were as many as 6-8 paddlers in the river at once.
Low perspective and slow shutter speed (1/20 sec) make for an unusual image.
