If America lived in New York again I would be a much better photographer.  She is one of my favorite people on Earth and without a doubt my favorite to photograph.  She is completely fun and completely photographic and the combination makes her pretty much the only real muse I have ever had. She is completely inspiring and makes me want to take photographs constantly.

I met her in NYC a few years ago but she quickly moved to Florida to go to school.  She has traveled around a bunch and is living in Saint Louis or Kansas City or something exciting like that.  Other than a visit to NYC about a year ago, the last time I really got to see her was right after Winter Music Conference in Miami. I was in Orlando for a few days and she lived there so I hit her up and we ended spending a day at Disney World.  Unfortunately I had just broken my camera in the process of helping trash a penthouse hotel room in Miami and had to make due with little blue plastic cameras that America and I bought at an Orlando flea market.

So fast forward two years and I find out I am headed back to Orlando right after WMC again.  I hadn’t talked to America in a couple of months, so I hit her up to see if she was still living in Orlando.  She wasn’t but she just happened to be visiting her family about an hour away from Orlando at the same time I was going to be there. I was pretty much ecstatic.  The guy who hired me to shoot a party in Orlando also works at Disney so he offered us free passess again.  We decided this year we should check out Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

Our trip got very delayed because the park was packed and they closed of Magic Kingdom. My friend was working there so we had to basically sneak in to get tickets. We pretty much had to lie to a half dozen Disney employees so we could get close to the Kingdom and park for free illegally.  The whole thing was quite the operation. When we finally got there we ended up getting completely lost and ended up on a dead end train ride to an island of goats that we could not escape for about 30 minutes.  Luckily the goats were fucking awesome and they head butted each other with great wrath and furious vengeance.  After the goats we hit up a mediocre Yeti themed roller coaster and we got to go on a safari where we saw hippos and things of that ilk.  Then we hit up a roller coaster for little kids and escaped from the park hungry for a terrible by gigantic Chinese buffet. The whole day was pretty much amazing.

During the day I took roughly two rolls of America with my 35mm camera and I am posting nearly 50 of the pictures and of those 50 I LOVE nearly a dozen of them.  That percentage is insanely unusually high. In a week I might shoot a thousand photos, publish 300 of them and love one or two. Loving 20 percent of the images is phenomenal, but then again so is America.  So, with that in mind, please click here to see all the photos from my trip to Disney World with America; my muse.

Comments (4)