Whole Foods, Part Way Open

  This morning marks an historical event, the grand opening of the Whole Foods Grocery store in Boise, Idaho. This is the national chain's first store in Idaho and today has been a much anticipated date for many Bosiean grocery store enthusiasts. Today's store schedule: 7:30 am oatmeal breakfast in the parking lot, proceeds going to Idaho Food Bank, 10:00 inaugural speech from Mayor Dave Bieter, followed by normal operations of a grocery store, ie. putting food in a cart, then paying for it.

 8:00 am Let the buzz begin.

Octo-Copter sky-cam ready for take-off. Will be filming RedBull Atheletes purchasing groceries.

 “You'll never guess where I am....”

 Get your wallet out. It's time party! (Organic Bud Light!, Here we o.g. Boise!)

Efficeny.

Security guard explaining to yet another person that you can't buy stuff yet.

We kept you in suspense about this store opening for months, who wants oatmeal?

 $3.00 for oatmeal, all proceeds got to the Idaho Food Bank

2 hours to kill. Plenty of time to read the paper.

 Keeping it local. Whole Foods arranged a ceremonial fly over from a flock of geese that hang out in the park across the street.

 8:15 am - This guy was doing a test drive of the shopping experience or in his words “I'm doing a demo.”


I would have stuck around for the commerce part of the event but I was in a hurry to post this blog. So I'm forced to share the sentiment of one already disgruntled would be patron that I passed in the parking lot. “What kind of grocery store opens at 10:00 am?”
Happy Shopping!

The Banks Magazine: Immersion Research ad shoot.

Well, we are now distributing our 3rd edition of the Banks Mag.
We are a locally produced mag out of Banks, ID. Loosely based around whitewater kayaking in the summer months, and soon to be covering snowboarding, skiing, skateboarding, etc. for the winter months. Any how, for the late summer 2008 edition, we were recruited by Immersion research to design an ad. Mike McKee inspired the idea for the ad (and also got Immersion Research on board as one of our advertisers). "How about a photo of what we do every day: hitchhike to paddle the North Fork Payette?" So here is the process we went about getting the photos for the ad.



Yes McKee, we are gonna need our paddles.

Luckily our boss, Phil White, at Bear Valley River Co., let us borrow his truck. Also his girlfriend, Wendy, let us borrow a bale of hay. We had our fellow employee, Shane, drive us up to go kayaking.




Now of course if we wanted it to look like were going kayaking we decided to really go kayaking. So, I thought it would be a good idea to get some shots on the way up. I also thought it would be a good idea to stand up in the back of the truck while we were ripping up Hwy 55. Mike, Melissa and Preston thought it wasn't a good idea but they did think it was funny.














The temperature read about 105° F on the stick this particular day and we hadn't brought any water for our mid-day shoot in the blazing sun. Everyone did really well, despite the miserable heat, dehydration and the seemingly ridiculous directions from the photographer (me).





So here it is: the final ad. With the creative guidance of McKee, I was able to come up with this tag line: "Gear for the rich and famous."

I think that kind of sums up our lifestyle.

A Big thanks also goes out to Roger from Immersion Research for helping to support the Banks Mag.

Check out more photos at endlessorbit.smugmug.com, and videos at liverad.net!