42 | JUNE 10 • 2021
ARTS&LIFE
PHOTOGRAPHY
R
andall Kaplan, raised in
Michigan and based in
California, is making a
public splash with a project that
mixes pleasure, business and
artistry.
Holding a longtime love of
beaches and a background of
billion-dollar business successes,
Kaplan launched Sandee, a firm
providing worldwide beach tour-
ism information, and put togeth-
er Bliss: Beaches (Cameron), an
aesthetic coffee table book offer-
ing 121 aerial views of splendor-
ous waterfronts.
Kaplan’s photographs rep-
resent only 10 percent of the
beaches he has enjoyed and now
shares through large and colorful
prints. He anticipates readers
will be captivated visually and
consider travel buoyed by Sandee
data.
“Over the years, I’ve had a
number of people see my photos
and ask if they could purchase
some, and I thought maybe there
would be an interest in publish-
ing a book of them,
” said Kaplan,
a camera buff who taught him-
self how to use drones, which he
defines as cameras that fly.
“I bought my first drone six
years ago because I thought shots
taken from the air are breath-
takingly beautiful. I watched five
hours of video to learn to fly a
drone and learned more by fly-
ing it in a very precise way. I got
better and better at framing or
centering something when I’m
thousands of feet away.
”
Images of vast and alluring
expanses of sand and surf —
locales often visited with family
— reach from Laguna Beach
near his California home to the
Dalmatian Coast in Croatia.
The beach that turned the
tide on his recreational inter-
est was located along the coast
of Fort Lauderdale in Florida,
where he vacationed with close
relatives while in his teens. The
most recently enjoyed beach was
along Cabo San Lucas in Mexico,
where he traveled with two of his
five children in their teens.
Kaplan and wife, Madison,
a model and clothing designer
(Madtown Collection), celebrat-
ed their 2010 wedding with a
honeymoon at a Thailand beach
resort overlooking the Andaman
Sea.
“From a practical point of
view, I don’t have a favorite
beach, but one of my favorites,
Motu Roa, can be seen on the
cover of the book,
” Kaplan said.
“To get there, I rented a jet ski
and rode 90 minutes from my
hotel in Bora Bora. We were
the only ones there, and it had
soft white sand and warm, crys-
tal-clear turquoise water.
”
From a strictly practical point
of view, Sandee was developed
to accommodate a wide range of
beach lovers by providing a data-
base that lists beach information
according to 94 categories for
some 50,000 beaches across
more than 200 countries.
“One of our goals at Sandee
is to provide beach visitors the
ability to choose their perfect
beaches,
” said Kaplan, who has
trademarked himself as Mr.
Beach. “We’re the only resource
and company in the world that
has this information for every
beach in the world.
A Feast for the Eyes
SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Visit beautiful beaches of the world
in a new cof
ee table book.
St. Regis Bora Bora