Shooting ADIDAS SWIM Campaign in Miami
The Miami sun is unforgiving, a brilliant, relentless force that turns the surface of the pool into a shattered mirror. I’ve lived in this city long enough to know the textures of its light—how it cuts through the midday humidity, how it paints sharp, geometric shadows on the concrete pool deck, and how it transforms ordinary water into something cinematic and profound. Today, that light is my primary collaborator, shaping every frame, dictating the mood, and illuminating the very human stories we are here to document. There is a specific scent to this kind of morning—chlorine mixing with heavy, salt-tinged air, sunscreen, and the faint metallic tang of camera gear baking in the heat.
We are shooting a campaign that feels fundamentally shifted from the standard commercial rhythm I often navigate. There is a palpable electricity on set today, a collective exhale from a cast that feels genuinely seen. To me, true inclusion doesn’t mean just checking a demographic box on a production call sheet; it means capturing the unruly, authentic joy of people entirely unguarded in their own skin. The water acts as a great equalizer. It holds you up, it refracts and distorts the light across your body in surreal, beautiful ways, and it magnifies every microscopic flinch or genuine smile. I want to shoot this with the same visceral honesty I use when photographing my friends back home—getting intimately close, feeling the splash on my face, letting the droplets hit the lens, and allowing the imperfections to tell the story.
I remember sitting in my Oviedo Studios office, the Miami traffic humming just beyond the windows, reviewing the initial concept deck for this project. The client was Adidas, and the brief was brilliantly ambitious, demanding a delicate balance of brand identity and profound humanity. The direction centered entirely on highlighting the Different bathing suits design for Transgender, Muslim and oversize demographics with the quality and edge characteristic of Adidas. My immediate goal was to figure out how to take that structured corporate objective and translate it into a purely sensory, lived-in experience. You can’t just photograph a garment; you have to photograph the way a person occupies it, the way they breathe, move, and exist within it. I aimed to capture the breathless rush of breaking the water’s surface, the cascading silver bubbles exhaled from deep, burning lungs, and the beautiful, chaotic choreography of bodies in motion.
Moving from the geometric, controlled confines of the swimming pool to the open, untamed rhythm of the ocean shifts the emotional tenor of the day entirely. Suddenly, the pristine aquamarine of chlorinated water is replaced by the frothing, chaotic whitecaps of the Atlantic. The sea foam washes over arms and legs, grounding us in the salt, the grit, and the sand of Miami's expansive coastline. There is an incredible grace in these moments of quiet floating, an absolute surrender to the current that you simply cannot direct or stage.
Whether we are capturing a wild, bursting laugh against a crashing wave, or the absolute serenity of a body buoyed by salt, the intention remains the same: radical self-acceptance. Drawing from my Cuban-Colombian roots, I always look for that warmth, that familial ease. The people in front of my lens aren't just models; they are vessels of an evolving culture, mirroring the diversity that breathes life into the streets of Miami every single day.
To me, commercial lifestyle photography is only successful if it completely transcends its own commerciality. It needs to look like a stolen memory, a frame pulled seamlessly from a beautiful, unending summer. As I swim alongside the talent, encased in my water housing, kicking hard to keep pace with the swift backstrokes cutting through the dark blue depths, I am reminded of why I gravitated toward the camera in the first place. My grandfather used to talk about the spirit of a moment, that fleeting, elusive second where all the elements—light, water, skin, emotion—lock into a harmonious truth. He taught me to observe the world not just as taking pictures, but as collecting evidence of life. Down here, beneath the shimmering surface, the noise of the city is swallowed whole, leaving only the rhythmic thumping of water against the eardrums and the visual poetry of limbs gliding through the blue.
By late afternoon, the intense overhead blaze has softened into something longer, more deliberate. The shadows stretch out like bruised purple ribbons across the textured concrete, projecting the rigid lines of the safety railings into sharp abstract art. The echoing splashes begin to fade, slowly replaced by the tired, happy quiet of a crew packing up wet equipment. The swim caps come off, the heavy towels are draped over cold, sun-kissed shoulders, and the raw, electric energy of the day starts to settle into the warm evening. It’s in these quiet transitions, these deeply ordinary conclusions, that the true weight of the images sets in.
The water remembers the shapes we leave behind, and for a moment, the camera holds them still.