Case study 03

Éric Deguil × NRS

Pyrénées, France — July 2026

The situation

Éric Deguil is a five-time extreme kayak world champion, European champion in 2024, and ranked second in the world at 44. He paddles for NRS, who announced him to their athlete roster in August 2026.

The brief was simple to state and hard to execute: a set of stills that show what that level actually looks like, with the gear readable in enough of them to be useful to the brand.

We had less than a day. We left Éric’s place around 8:30 and were finished by 16:00.

The forecast gave us sun. The gauges gave us nothing, levels across the range were already low and still dropping, and we knew it. We went anyway, on a specific bet: that a few features would still hold enough water in the pools below them to be worth a frame.

The bet was wrong.

eric deguil avant navigation par cédric eyma

Gave de Gavarnie

Conditions

Roughly three of those hours were spent in the car, Gave de Cauterets, Gave de Gavarnie, Argelès-Gazost, the approaches near Lourdes, and finally Pau.

We built the location list together. I brought the constraints: the frames I wanted, the light I needed, where the sun would fall and at what hour, we checked that on a map before leaving. Éric knows these valleys the way you know your own street, and proposed the places that could answer them. One of them, a waterfall, was mine; he knew it, I did not.

Every one of them was empty. We could see the river running dry before we even reached the waterfall. We scouted on foot, walked down to look into one gorge, and turned back. A water-level app confirmed it afterwards: there was nothing anywhere in the range that day.

The drop we had planned, the single feature that would have carried the whole brief, was not runnable. Cloud cover was total from the first frame to the last.

Gave de Gavarnie

My role

I gave up on the brief as written and split the day into two registers.

Without a runnable drop, power was off the table. So I stopped trying to photograph force and photographed scale instead: a vertical gorge, walls closing overhead, the boat small in the frame. From parking the van to being back at it, that sequence took between one hour and one hour twenty. It carries the editorial weight of the set.

Gave de Gavarnie

Then I proposed Pau. Éric was not enthusiastic. The section is not technically demanding for him, and it is where he trains every day, it sits next to his work. But I had shot tests there the day before and I knew the water would read. The artificial slalom course had shut its gates, so we worked the natural gave opposite the club, the old international competition stretch. On the frame it gives the texture and the whitewater the gorges could not. Two locations, two jobs: one for the scale, one for the substance and the detail.

Positioning, then waiting. Éric knew the gorge; I set the brief for what I needed from it. I took my position and waited about thirty minutes while he finished the descent on foot and got into the boat. We worked on a whistle: two blasts when he pushed off. From the speed of the current I had under two minutes before he entered my frame. There was no second run.

Product frames were a decision, not an accident. Two frames put the NRS gear where it can be read, the PFD during the portage, and a detail of the drysuit sleeve. Both were deliberate. Neither was posed. I set up the portage frame knowing what I wanted from it and waited for the moment; the sleeve I took when his arm arrived in the right position on its own. Nothing here was staged, and I did not ask Éric to hold anything.

eric deguil sur le gavce de pau par cedric eyma

Gave de Pau

gave de pau

What was produced

Sixteen finished stills, colour-graded, in NRS’s inbox on Tuesday morning — shot on the Saturday, on my desk Monday, out the door within 72 hours.

The set covers three registers: gorge and scale, whitewater and movement, gear and portage.

What the partner could use

The set was built to be used, not only to be looked at. Verticals that hold up in feed and story without recropping. Horizontal action for editorial and web headers. Two frames where the PFD and the drysuit cuff are legible at product scale. A portrait that works for an athlete announcement. Delivered graded, without watermarks, with the credit line written into the IPTC of every file.

A shoot day with no water, no sun, no feature to run and a working window of roughly one hour still produced a usable set inside three days.

eric deguil portant son kayak par cedric eyma

Gave de Pau

Gave de Pau

That is the argument. Not that the conditions were good, they were not, and the images exist anyway.

Gave de Gavarnie

Photo: Cédric Eyma

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