Jordan Hollender and the Sea

“There’s nothing like shooting in the ocean, in winter,” Jordan Hollender says. He recently had to do just that while on assignment for Fast Company. Leslie Dela Vega, a Fast Company photo editor, has been working with Jordan for years, first meeting when she was photo editor at Vibe. She brought Jordan on for this interesting project while Kathy Nguyen, another Fast Company photo editor, helped produce the shoot.

The assignment was to illustrate an article about Chinese tech companies. When Jordan first got the call about a China-related shoot, he thought they wanted him to actually go to China. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. He admits, “After I realized that it was in New York, I was a little disappointed.” However, Jordan’s disappointment didn’t last long. Once he found out more about the shoot—which involved shooting businessmen and women coming out of the ocean—his interest was once again piqued.

Jordan became even more interested when he learned how much freedom he would have with the shoot: “freedom to pick the beach location and find that main shot, as well as to direct the models as I wanted.” After some thought, he decided to shoot both on location and in studio,

In the beginning, we were back and fourth between planning to shoot in studio or fully on location. Even though I love getting it all in one shot, I had to make the final call to shoot the models in studio and composite them in. Weather and finances helped me make that decision. The majority of the shoot was done in studio. We photographed one model in the ocean—we were both in wetsuits. We wanted to have some good images of the suit being hit by waves to sample later. All of the models seen in the final image were shot in studio, with a lot of water being splashed at them.

The shoot taught Jordan a lot about production, as well as shooting for composite “which is much different than seeing exactly what you’re getting.” He had some help though, from retoucher Pablo Cubalre, who helped Jordan “figure out what to focus on according to what he had in mind for the composite.”

Fast Company was happy with the final image, which in turn, made Jordan happy.

View more of Jordan’s work on his website, jordanhollender.com.