Making a Splash on Opening Day

The lazy river looks great, but this shoot was anything but lazy!

Nothing is more refreshing than cold water on a hot summer day, whether it’s an ice-cold glass or a whole day at a water park. Recently, I had the opportunity to photograph the largest indoor water park in the U.S., the Island Waterpark at Showboat in Atlantic City. The construction company behind it all, E.P. Guidi, wanted to highlight one of its largest-scale projects to date in time for the grand opening.

This is one of the few places where you can see the ocean from the inside of a water slide.

Photographing for a construction company often creates additional scheduling constraints, as there’s rarely more than a few days between construction completion and a public opening. Bad weather can shorten the shooting window even further, even in an indoor venue, because it affects the light coming through the glass windows. In fact, the week I was set to shoot was so rainy that I ended up completing the entire shoot within a three-hour window on opening day. With that in mind, I had to work quickly and prioritize perfecting the best shots, with Photoshop as a handy backup.

Even though I was indoors, the park’s glass exterior limited my shooting window to clear days—a rarity during rainy season.

Upon arrival, I had to work around several last-minute construction touch-ups. To stay out of the builders’ way, I took my main shot—an overview of most of the park—from a platform halfway up the steps to a large water slide. I repeated the same shot towards the end of my shoot, when the workers had moved to other tasks. This gave me more source material for later, when I would need to remove obstacles in post-production.

Here’s an overview of the park that I was able to put together from multiple frames.

Note the workers and construction equipment I was able to remove from this shot.

Greg and I also stopped by a few days later, once the weather was good again, to capture a few exterior shots of the park.

After the bad weather passed, I was able to get this cool drone shot. Several of the park’s slides snake out of the building before returning riders to the pool inside.

The bright sun-shaped motifs in the entryway offer a preview of the excitement inside.