Please enter your email and website or LinkedIn to receive more information about our free and paid accounts.
Please enter your email address below and we’ll send you instructions on how to change your password.
John Kuczala is a Maplewood, NJ based photographer who recently shot a cover for the July/August 2018 issue of AAA Living magazine. Instead of heading to the beach, John decided to set up this shoot in his driveway, using 30 bags of sand and photographing from a second-story window.
From some casting shots, I was able to figure out about how much background I’d need. The depth of a bag of sand from Home Depot was about what I thought would look good to show footprints and look natural. A little math, and that ended up being thirty bags. Luckily the weather was nice the day before the shoot because the sand needed to be dried out. I spread it out and raked it about every half hour to get the moisture out. That and keeping it clean of all the oak flowers falling off the trees was the hardest part.
Before the shoot, I kept track of when the sunlight would be shining across the whole driveway. I had the model and stylist come a little before the whole area would be shaded. That gave me about an hour and a half to shoot with strobe and we covered two different bathing suits and different hats in a variety of poses. Once the set was in direct sun, we did the same thing. In between, I sent images to the art director and she was very happy. I knew if we needed to shoot more, we could do strobe in shade again later, but we didn’t need to. In any case the two looked similar and they ended up choosing one lit by strobe.
Check out our other great photographers on our Find Photographers page.