I’ve shared several photosets taken by (or with) Drake Avenue in the past, and as always I had a wonderful time creating with him! I don’t even really remember how it came about, but both of us wanted to travel somewhere to create, so I invited him for an overnight van camping adventure! He was actually the first person to go van camping with me, I had previously only been solo van camping. It’s a tight fit on the blow-up twin mattress I was using, but we’ve known each other for years and I knew he would be a gentleman (and he was) so we both slept pretty well.

Before the sleeping-in-the-van part, we had planned to drive into the mountains and find some waterfalls to shoot near, but when the day came for me to pick him up the weather in the mountains was ALL RAIN for the next few days. We decided that morning that we’d go east instead of west to hopefully avoid the bad weather. We ended up in Southern Pines NC, which I had never been to and was really beautiful, even though its kinda in the middle of nowhere. As we were driving it started to rain off and on, and we saw this abandoned chimney and all the beautiful pine trees in rows off the side of the road, so we decided to stop and see if the rain would clear. It did. We hopped out of the van and took some images by the chimney, and then ran across the road into the pines to shoot the rest of his roll of film. When we finished we were starving, so we went into town and ate at an Asian place, then went and bought fruit at a grocery store and hung out in the van eating it and listening to the rain that had started… then we found a hotel parking lot to park and sleep in. I was able to park in the corner of the lot so we had trees on two sides of us, which was really nice because it rained that night and we got to watch the rain and the trees through the back window as we were falling asleep.

I have another photoset from this trip to share with you from the next day, look for that coming soon! It’s on Lomo Purple which is some of my FAVORITE film. <3

I absolutely love spontaneous road trips and photoshoots! There’s something really exhilarating about not having a plan and figuring it out as you go.