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

