Bike Week Iowa Style

Happy Valentine's Day.

I looked through our stock footage from last year and I found this fitting shot from Ragbrai. A young girl had "Marry Me Lance?" written on her back at the 35th annual event. Every year during the last week of July it's Daytona Beach meets New Orleans for the bike ride across Iowa. A Marti Gras on bicycles. Up to 10,000 bikes.

Ragbrai is the longest, largest and oldest touring bicycle ride in the world. Last year Lance Armstrong road the majority of the ride and Lance sightings were legendary. This young lady didn't want to miss the opportunity.

We received a call from Franklin Films down Nashville way to shoot a group of Ugandans for the national television program Joni and Friends Television Series. That TV series began airing on TBN this month. The Africans we were taping were riding as a fundraiser for Child Voice International. It gave us an opportunity to learn to ride a tandem bike and shoot HD footage at the same time.

It was a picturesque two hour ride/shoot through the rolling hills between Stout and Cedar Falls, Iowa surrounded by corn, farms and one romantic biker.  

 

Shooting for National Television

The end of 2007 did not only bring opportunities for River Run Productions to video tape many presidential candidates leading up to the Iowa caucuses, but we also did two shoots for the nationally syndicated TV program The Montel Williams Show. The screen shot above shows the young man we shot on location in Marshalltown, Iowa. The other video shoot was in Des Moines.

I thought of this last week as it was announced that Montel would be stopping production after 17 years of being on the air. That's a long for any TV program. Montel won a daytime Emmy Award in 1996 for Outstanding Talk Show Host.

The Political View From Iowa

Where's Waldo? 

Can you spot the political candidate in the above photograph? I took the photo at the Iowa State Fair this past summer and it summarizes what Iowa (and the candidates) went though this past year in Iowa and what the rest of the country (and again the candidates) went through the last couple weeks leading up to Super Tuesday.

We received a call to do camera work at an event where six of the presidential candidates were speaking. Having only seen one candidate in my life I thought it was an excellent opportunity. Little did I know it would be up close and personal as I was within ten feet of most of the candidates.

In the months leading up to the January 3, 2008 Iowa Caucuses I photographed and or video taped a total of 13 presidential hopefuls. More than most states will have on their ballots today. While many of our productions take us outside of Iowa, most of these shots were taken within 10 miles of our office in Cedar Falls. The photos below are part of the fun of being a video producer based in Iowa: