Arc Boats on Flathead Lake | Jason Thompson Photography
COMMERCIAL WORK · ARC BOATS · FLATHEAD LAKE, MONTANA
The Frame I Didn’t Plan: Shooting Arc Boats on Flathead Lake
What a foil rider, a wake surfer, and the worst midday light in Montana taught me about the value of staying loose on a commercial shoot.
There’s a frame sitting in my Lightroom catalog right now that I didn’t direct, didn’t plan, and couldn’t have asked for if I tried. Drew Hollinger is on a hydrofoil about a hundred meters off the stern of an Arc Sport electric wake boat, pumping hard and picking up speed. And right there in the pocket of the wake, maybe thirty feet from where I’m standing on the deck, Beau is mid-surf — locked in, reading the wave. Between both of them and me is the Arc’s interior: clean lines, that sculpted hull, the boat’s whole story in one frame.
I didn’t call that shot. Drew just peeled off the wake on a whim. And I happened to be wide, watching.
That’s the thing about combining an editorial instinct with commercial work. You show up with a shot list. You execute the shot list. And then you stay loose long enough for the shoot to give you something better.
Why Flathead Lake
When Arc Boats came to me for this shoot, the location wasn’t a question. Flathead Lake in northwest Montana is one of the largest natural freshwater lakes west of the Mississippi, and it sits inside a landscape that does a lot of heavy lifting for a brand trying to communicate something about freedom, clean energy, and the American West. The Missions are right there on the horizon. The water in July is the kind of blue that doesn’t need a filter.
Drew is the operator of Flathead Wakeboard Academy. They are the best in the business for lessons and based right in Big Fork, Montana
I’ll be straight with you though — Flathead in the middle of a summer day is not a photographer’s dream. The light was flat and harsh when we were out there, the kind of midday sun that blows out highlights and kills shadow detail at the same time. It’s the challenge nobody puts in a behind-the-scenes reel. For a shoot like this, where you’re on the water and the schedule is driven by the riders and the boat — not by golden hour — you learn to adapt or go home empty-handed.
A lot of that day was solved in Lightroom. Pulling back highlights, lifting shadows, finding the contrast that makes water look like water and not a reflective ceiling. I won’t pretend the editing wasn’t a real part of the job on this one. It was.
What Arc Boats Is Actually Doing
Before I shoot for any brand, I spend time understanding what they’re actually selling beyond the product. Arc Boats is making 100% electric wake boats. That’s the technical fact. But what they’re really selling is the idea that you don’t have to choose between performance and doing right by the lake you’re riding on. Near-silent operation. Zero emissions. Instant electric torque that delivers a wake that can legitimately compete with anything running a combustion engine.
That context shapes every frame I’m going for. I’m not just shooting a boat. I’m shooting a thesis statement. The environment isn’t a backdrop — it’s part of the argument. A rider foiling in silence across a Montana lake, mountains behind him, not a cloud of exhaust in sight. That’s the brand doing its job through the image.
Three Disciplines, One Day
We covered wakesurfing, wakeboarding, and foil riding in a single day on the water with Mark Layton (works for Arc Boats), Drew Hollinger, Jim, and Beau. Each discipline has its own visual language and its own demands on the boat — and my job was to capture all three in a way that a marketing team could actually use across email, blog, and social without the images feeling like they came from three different shoots.
Wakesurfing is intimate — the rider is right there off the stern, close enough that you can see their expression. Wakeboarding opens up more real estate, wider angles, riders in the air if they’re going for tricks. Foiling is something else entirely. On a foil, the rider ghosts. They separate from the wake and find their own line, and when you catch them at the right moment they look like they’re flying two feet above the surface of the water with nothing underneath them. It’s visually arresting every single time.
And then there was that frame. Drew on the foil, way out. Beau in the pocket. The Arc interior in the foreground. I don’t know exactly when I fell in love with this kind of work — commercial projects where the brief is tight but there’s enough trust in the room that the real images happen in between the planned ones. That’s where I live as a photographer.
What I Deliver and Why It Matters Beyond the Images
For a client like Arc Boats, images that just look good aren’t enough. They need images that work — across a blog post, an email campaign, an Instagram feed, and potentially a press submission to a boating publication. That means every file I deliver is export-ready with SEO-optimized metadata baked in: descriptive filenames, IPTC titles and captions, keywords that mirror Arc’s own brand language so the images reinforce their search presence the moment they go live on the site.
I also deliver a caption sheet — a simple spreadsheet with one row per image, including suggested social captions and hashtag sets. No other photographer has handed their marketing team that. It saves them days of work and it means the images actually get used well instead of sitting in a Dropbox folder with generic filenames.
Fifteen years of shooting for brands like Patagonia, The North Face, Arc'teryx, and ESPN has taught me that a great image sitting in the wrong folder with the wrong filename is a missed opportunity for the client. My job doesn’t end at the edit.
If You’re an Art Director Reading This
Here’s what I want you to know: I show up with a plan, I execute the plan, and I stay alert long enough to catch the frame that wasn’t in the plan. That combination — commercial discipline and editorial instinct — is what I bring to every project, whether it’s a wake boat on Flathead Lake, a climbing route in the Gallatin, or a backcountry ski shoot above Bozeman in March.
I’m based in Bozeman, Montana, and I work with brands across the outdoor, water sports, and adventure space. If you’re building a campaign and you need someone who understands both the shot list and the space between shots — let’s talk.
