Barstow Harvey House | Route 66

The Harvey House Railroad Depot in Barstow, California is a unique railway station (and a cool stop if you're driving Route 66) that today holds city offices, a visitor center, two museums, and operates as an unstaffed passenger stop for Amtrak. Originally known as the Casa del Desierto, this station and hotel was opened in 1911 by the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.   

Harvey Houses were the result of the Fred Harvey Company, which created a chain of hotels, restaurants, and other hospitality businesses along the railroads throughout the Western United States. Fred Harvey is credited with creating the first restaurant chain in the U.S. and playing a major role in promoting tourism throughout the Southwest in the late 19th century. The railway provided the buildings and Fred Harvey's restaurants and hotels provided the quality service that travelers craved and eventually demanded. 

The station combines Spanish Renaissance and Classic Revival architectural styles with some additional Moorish influences. It is said to be the finest example of a depot-hotel remaining in California. In 1975, Casa del Desierto was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Casa del Desierto ca. 1912

JazzFest: Clubs, Pubs & Coffee Shops

Greetings! My name is Josh Pick and like Luke, I also love to create visual content. I’m pleased and honoured to be a guest on Luke’s blog - thanks Luke! I wanted to share the heart behind this project and also give you a glimpse into our very first collaboration. Hope you enjoy!

Collaboration is a beautiful thing.

I must admit that in doing freelance videography as a solo artist, it’s fun and quite freeing. But like anything, it also has its constraints. I’m convinced that humanity’s best work is done in collaboration with different minds coming together, celebrating each other and working towards a common goal in creating something meaningful.


When I officially met Luke earlier in 2015, I knew right away that I wanted to create something together. This JazzFest video was a fantastic opportunity that enabled us to do that and upon conceptualization, I was excited as I believed Luke’s style would be a great fit for this video.

Very quickly, we saw how differently we each approach film making, with our own styles and structures. In all honesty, it was a blast to discover. The beauty is in the diversity, seeing what each other’s gifts are, and celebrating those, rather than ever being afraid of them and I’m grateful that I’m at a point in my life where I can recognize that.

With the mystery of doing something new, we met, we planned and before we knew it, we were filming in that sweltering summer sun.

The result of this collaboration is our two styles blended together for the first time.



JazzFest

This festival really is unique. You can just sense it. It’s intimate and interactive. It’s diverse, professional and creative. There’s so much passion wrapped up in it all. To me, that’s meaningful. And our goal here, is to create a series of videos that encompass these multiple different aspects of JazzFest and truly display how diverse it is while provoking interest in the viewer to get out and go experience it for yourself.

The goal of this particular video was to merge creativity and the artistic community. The interplay between the intimacy of LIVE music within a food and drink atmosphere. To give you a taste of what it might be like to experience it, whether you prefer coffee or beer, nachos or muffins or a combination of the two.

Gross.

I really wanted to shoot this in a way that engages the viewer to, if possible, make you feel like you could be right there. We mostly shot hand held with plenty of close up shots, as it feels more intimate and gives off a more raw feel, helping the viewer therefore feel more connected to the moment. It was colour treated to feel warm and inviting, with a mix of some smooth shots which gives a nod to Jazz music.

One of my favourite shots is one of Luke’s where he filmed a silhouette of this little girl in a pink hat, dancing. She was the only one in the venue doing that, too - In a coffee shop of all places. It was a beautiful little moment. All these clips in different venues, with different styles of music make this amalgamation of something beautiful. Right here, right in this city in the heart of its unique downtown. I didn’t want anything posed or fabricated, I wanted to be like a fly on the wall and record what was naturally taking place around us.

I’m very much looking forward to creating more content with Luke that you can be sure will happen - content that’s going to help move this city forward, inspiring people, and contribute to higher achieved levels of excellence in the professional community while helping build the culture of something great. Something special. It may be a small town, but anything large started with a humble beginning.

I’m confident you’ll get the sense that there’s something special about this community. Something we have yet to see. And the content we get to create, will help us move towards it.

The Lost Road Trip: California

California has been on my mind a lot this year. With each visit I've become more ambitious in planning my shoots and documenting my exploration of places both familiar and off the beaten path. What may look like a vacation is actually a well thought out departure with the intent of capturing experiences and growing my professional brand of cultural photography. There's actually a ton of work that goes into it, hence it's pretty devastating when things go wrong.

A few weeks ago it all went very wrong. In the course of 15 minutes I lost roughly 8000 images from my summer road trip in California this June. Just typing that hurts. On a professional level it's a huge setback for some of the new work I had planned. How might this happen, you ask? Well despite backing up my images in triplicate, essentially three things had to go wrong to lose 8000 pictures in a blink. 

1. The power went out while my computer was updating. This inadvertently damaged my "working projects" hard drive making it inaccessible. 2. My external backup for those images in "working projects" was accidentally overwritten at some point by a folder of California images that I also shot this year, but not the ones that were lost. 3. The last resort was the backup I'd made to my laptop, only to discover it was incomplete.  

Roadside California
From the coast to the desert, from downtown Los Angeles to crossing the Golden Gate in San Francisco, this is a growing photography series featuring the landmarks, culture, natural wonders, and visual mosaic that is California. http://goo.gl/SIOmDk
Posted by Editing Luke on Monday, November 9, 2015

It's insane to have prepared for something just like this to happen, and then still see the dominoes fall from seemingly random quirks and accidents. More than anything, it's just bad luck. It was a completely random twist of fate that resulted in the loss of over a weeks worth of work and several thousand dollars worth of travel. Fuck.

The stress is made worse by the notion that I must have the images somewhere else. That's always been the case. And yet, no. They're gone. I've looked everywhere. I can picture what I shot and it's so depressing to know some of that stuff can never be recreated. 

What's left of the road trip is a series of fragments and clues to larger galleries that would've appeared on this site. I have 11 photo sets from the June trip that were completed, were posted to Editing Luke, and then backed up to my archive. I have some random shots that I took for my Instagram account. And, my friend Travis did me a huge favor and was able to recover about 900 images from the scrambled hard drive. It's certainly better than nothing, but in the end I lost about 70% of what I captured. 

Images from all over Los Angeles, driving the California portion of Route 66, coastal landmarks around Oceanside, and exploration around the Salton Sea - gone. I chalk it up to a lesson learned. I'll be more dilligent about having copies moving forward. And other than that the only option is to go back. The flight is already booked.