Saltwater Wading Gear on the New England Coast
A recent personal project featuring some Simms saltwater fishing gear, Freesalt wading boots and waders, shot along a New England beach as spring striper season opens up along the Atlantic coast.
Simms is one of the most respected names in the fly fishing and freshwater world, based out of Bozeman, Montana. Their saltwater line is strong but less visible, and it's gear I personally fish with along Northeast beaches, jetties, and canals when I'm surfcasting for striped bass and bluefish. I wanted to put together a set of commercial product and lifestyle images that showed this gear doing what it was built to do, in wet sand, breaking surf, and real saltwater conditions.
The shoot was structured as a full commercial content set rather than a handful of hero frames. That meant pulling in tight product detail shots of the Freesalt wading boots, the waders, the sole grip pattern, and the laces and hardware, alongside wider environmental lifestyle frames of the angler walking into the surf, casting, and moving along the shoreline. The goal was to give a brand the kind of range you can pull from for landing pages, e-commerce, social, paid media, and editorial use, all from a single production.
A key piece of the shoot was incorporating my underwater housing from Aquatech to capture over-under split shots of the waders and boots as they moved through the waterline. Over-under photography is a natural fit for wading gear that spends its life on both sides of the waterline, and it's a technique that separates my work on location work from standard studio or beach-side shooting.
