Luxury Travel Advisor Branding Session in Boulder, Colorado
When Baylee reached out to me about photos for her new branding and website in Colorado, I couldn’t have been more excited.
Baylee Markward is a luxury travel advisor, working both independently and also as a travel designer with upannaway, a full-service boutique travel agency. A fellow Ohio State alum, Baylee was the maid of honor in a wedding I photographed a few years ago, and we’ve stayed Instagram friends since. I was so excited to see her take the leap away from corporate America into luxury travel advisory, a move that was inspiring to me and my own career trajectory at the time. I find myself saving, screenshotting and taking mental notes of Baylee’s posts all the time, between the content she shares from her own travels, as well as tips and inspiration for planning travel.
Baylee found the perfect place for these photos - an epic mountainside Airbnb in the Rockies outside of Boulder, which was featured in Condé Nast Traveler in 2022 and has earned the official credit of “Guest Favorite: One of the most loved homes on Airbnb.” I think I looked at the Airbnb’s page for approximately 0.2 seconds before saying yes, we need to shoot there. There was so much natural light thanks to the floor to ceiling windows, and the views of the mountain perfectly encapsulated Baylee’s jet setting vibe. Not to mention how beautifully decorated it is.
The day was quite an adventure, to say the least. While Denver is known for its ~300 days of sunshine a year, of course the day we’d planned for the session was the only guaranteed cloudy day for a long stretch, but we were committed and ruthlessly optimistic everything would still work out. We hit the road for Boulder around 8am for what should’ve been a ~45 minute drive. About 5 minutes into the drive it started snowing. 10 minutes into the drive we got a call from the Airbnb host saying that it was snowing extremely hard in the mountains and he cautioned us driving out there and into the mountains in the conditions. We weren’t deterred, so with Baylee’s trusty four-wheel drive we slowwwwwwwly made the 2.5 hour trek out to the mountains, thanks to a few snow squalls and crawling traffic. We drove up steep, windy roads into the mountain to the Airbnb’s perch, which was in the middle of a cloud when we arrived. While the view of the mountains behind it were part of the appeal of the Airbnb, the cloud backdrop made for some really cool unexpected photos during the first half of the session. Then, as our prize for making the trek in the snow storm, when we were close to wrapping up the session, the clouds parted and revealed a beautiful, sunny, blue sky and the mountains behind the Airbnb. It ended up being the perfect situation, leading to more variety in the photos and the backdrop of Baylee’s session.
Despite the delays, I still managed to get to the airport in time after the session, and I was thankful for the time Baylee and I passed in the car chatting about travel, our businesses, and our lives. While we’re in two different industries, it was a great example of how much we as small business owners can relate to and support each other on our own paths.
Follow Baylee on Instagram for travel tips, inspiration and assistance with your next trip!
