Kass Martin Z-Life Magazine cover for ZUMBA

Zumba keeps Jeffery moving! No sweat, just high energy celebrity Zumba instructors. The great folks at the Fitness and lifestyle company commissioned me to do several spreads for their cool magazine Z-Life.

Kass Martin is a superstar Zumba instructor and when she moves, it’s all high energy. She flew in from Utah for her photo shoot on South Beach at Miami. The crew call time was very early, it’s great to shoot on a beach and the art director wanted Kass’s beautiful black hair to be backlighted. That seemed simple enough. But it took a moment for Kass’s vibrant blue eyes to adjust to the contrastly sun baked almost white sand, it guess to be straight, kinda of biege sand on Miami Beach. My team built a light box with scrims to soften the sun light and put a black fabric scrim behind me to help Kass’s eyes adjust. It was a contrasty day, with no clouds to soften the light and the raising morning sun was gleaming off the Atlantic ocean. I wanted to have a soft background, with tones that seem like they were lifted from a Rothko painting or Sugimoto photograph.

Here’s a brief behind the scenes video.

We also did a version of Kass sitting on the sand.

After getting a tan on my permanent tan we went to SplashLight studios. Zumba Fitness has a line of fashion for the gym and for any other time of the day. Valeska from Elite was the model.