A Feast for the Eyes

ARTS&LIFE

PHOTOGRAPHY

A Feast for the Eyes Visit beautiful beaches of the world in a new co ee table book.

St. Regis Bora Bora

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Randall 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 tourism information, and put together Bliss: Beaches (Cameron), an aesthetic coffee table book offering 121 aerial views of splendorous waterfronts.

Kaplan’s photographs represent 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 publishing a book of them,” said Kaplan, a camera buff who taught himself 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 breathtakingly beautiful. I watched five hours of video to learn to fly a drone and learned more by flying 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 interest 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), celebrated 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, crystal-clear turquoise water.”

From a strictly practical point of view, Sandee was developed to accommodate a wide range of beach lovers by providing a database 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.