Verbal snapshot of One Mile Lake at 6pm on a Saturday:  a 6 year old boy casts for fish beside his dad off the floating dock. Half a dozen kayakers paddle across the lake. Dog-walkers enjoy the new boardwalk. A family gathers around a fire in the great metal fire-pit. Someone sits in meditation as the light over the mountains shifts and softens.

And I watch on as photographer Robin O’Neill shoots images for a campaign we’re creating for Pemberton’s Economic Development Commission.

The goal is to spread the word that Pemberton is a place worth investing your time, your money or your enterprise.

One of the community’s most outstanding assets is its social capital. It’s a hot-bed of creative, enterprising, fascinating folk. Home-based studios and cottage industries are producing some niche, but highly acclaimed products. A good number of these creative enterprising people just happen, simultaneously, to be ridiculously good-looking. So, we didn’t have too look too far for models to infuse the campaign with genuineness and local character.

While the kids stole our hearts during the shoot, the silent star of the session was Andy Lambrecht’s hand-crafted custom stand-up paddleboard.

A surfer and a wood-worker, Andy has brought his passions into alignment in a way that also serves his values – to tread lightly, to do no harm, to liberate the inherent value in material things by not casting away what is still valuable, to have, as William Morris famously proclaimed, nothing in life that is not both both beautiful and useful.

All Andy’s hollow wood surfboards are built with reclaimed wood.

Andy built a custom board for Norm Hann, who is paddling an epic 300km stand-up paddle journey in the Great Bear Rainforest to protect the region from a proposed oil pipeline. With BP still spewing 40,000+ barrels of oil a day into the ocean, the potential risk of running pipelines and supertankers into pristine environments is apparent to everyone.

The board has already had its first magazine cover – it can be spied in Masa Takei‘s May 2010 cover story in Explore magazine, Riding the New Wave.