Navigating the rapids... Look at these brave souls, rafting on a wild river, coming so close to the rocky cliffs!  Terrifying, right?

Actually, the raft is about an inch long, and that's not water at all.  No cliffs, either.  That's foil paper which I found at the craft store; you may have come across similar material in a box of candy.  It's light and pliable, and I made the waves by "pinching" the paper around the raft until it looked right.

Light:  nothing but available light from my studio window, which was to my right when I set up the scene. Typical cloudy winter day.

Made with my Olympus EM-10 Mk II and my beloved 60mm F2.8 macro lens, 1/8 sec at f20, ISO 1600.  Then I cropped it a bit and played with some monochrome filters in Lightroom, using the graduated filter in the upper right corner to make those cliffs look especially scary.

I will confess that I don't often start with a preplanned "vision" for my images.  I do a lot of test shots and try a lot of angles and positions until I see something I like.  I don't get too wrapped around the axle if I can't make an idea work - there's always a way. In other words - when I make an image like this, I'm playing.  And really - isn't that what it's all about?  Of course it is.

Here's a studio view, to bring us back to reality.  (Forgive the lack of focus - I did this solely as a reference.)