Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky

Opened in 1875, Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky is the iconic thoroughbred racetrack most famous for hosting the annual Kentucky Derby. In addition to horse racing, Churchill Downs also contains the Kentucky Derby Museum which features an array of artifacts spanning the history of the event. From the horses to the betting to the flurry of activity behind the scenes, my exploration of Churchill Downs made for an unforgettable day at the races.

Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky ca. 1905

 

New Hometown Prints Up in Medicine Hat, Alberta

An order so nice, they made it twice!

The Boston Pizza (Box Springs) location in Medicine Hat, Alberta is the latest local business to add a custom collection of large scale Editing Luke prints to their walls. This follows the custom set that went up in the Boston Pizza (Strachan Road) location in 2018.

It bears repeating how truly humbled I am by the way my work has been embraced by so many diverse businesses and travel organizations around North America since this business went full-time in 2014. In fact, there are now more than 20 prominent installations of my work in my hometown of Medicine Hat, Alberta alone.

I can't say thank you enough to all those who have made these successes possible.

2020: Disneyland's Most Exclusive Year

Luck plays a big role in being a travel photographer, because a random story can sometimes elevate snapshots into a document of something more profound.

I certainly couldn't have predicted it at the time, but when Disneyland in Anaheim, California closed around this time last year at the start of the pandemic, suddenly having images that were shot inside the park in 2020 (in retrospect) turned our touristy day off at 'the Happiest Place on Earth' into one of my most exclusive travel shoots.

On March 14, 2020 both Disneyland and California Adventure closed to the public. After lasting more than a year, plans for reopening have finally been scheduled for April 2021, but this closure is unlike anything Disneyland has experienced since it first opened in 1955. 

To put it dramatically, there were only 10 weeks a person could have gone to Disneyland in 2020 making it the most exclusive year in the park's history. 

What's interesting about shooting travel content professionally is that you quickly learn to lean into a lot of what you can't control. It just so happened that coincidentally timing a visit to one of the world's most popular tourist destinations a few weeks before a global pandemic turned a casual shoot into something archival practically overnight.  

What does this mean? Nothing really. But in a year filled with a lot of nothing, it's just a bit crazy to have such a stark contrast stuck in my head between then and now. 

I still have hundreds of images of Disneyland from the 2020 visit yet to be released, but just after the closing last year I posted a new series from Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge that immediately took off amid the publicity surrounding the park closures. I can't help but draw comparisons to my travel shoots in Paris last year, where otherwise timeless destinations were instantly dated by the realities that 2020 brought.

As the reopenings continue, and as I find myself trying to build some context around the changes of this last year, I do think it's funny that a random trip to Disneyland became a novelty because of the date. Then again, I feel like a lot things are going to seem like a novelty after 2020.