Drew Pendergast

Writes for Jaunt Post

About

Drew Pendergast is a 35-year-old freelance editorial photographer working out of a rented studio loft in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. The edit station is two monitors and a rack of labeled external drives; one full brick wall behind it is covered floor-to-ceiling in contact sheets from eight years of assignments. The travel features started as a side hustle in 2018, when publications were sending him to cities he had never visited and expecting him to know the good from the overlooked by Saturday afternoon.

He started paying for the recommended tours himself, partly to understand what his clients were sending readers into, partly because the logistics of a hop-on-hop-off circuit told him things a map did not: which monuments are close enough together to be worth a stop between shoots, and which require a bus transfer that eats forty minutes of the window he needs for golden-hour light. Queue time and break-even math became part of the field notes alongside focal length and stop count. By 2022 the travel work had become the full-time job.

He routes drafts past Priyanka Suri, a photo editor he met at a portfolio review in Brooklyn in 2019, for caption accuracy and hours details. Weston Arambula, a fellow travel photographer he overlapped with on a press preview in Lisbon in 2021, keeps a shared spreadsheet tracking every guided tour either of them has paid for out of pocket. Readers fact-check too: Nikoleta Baran sent a visiting-hours correction on the Sagrada Família post that turned out to be accurate, and has been trading notes on European timed-entry systems ever since.

Thirty-two cities across the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia over eight years. His context for all of it comes from being a client of these tours, not from working in the industry. A photographer who has been on the receiving end of a lot of itineraries, including the ones that ended the afternoon early and the ones that turned out to be the reason the trip worked.

Posts by Drew Pendergast

Disclosure

A few links on this site are affiliate links. Book through one, I get a small kickback, your price stays the same. It does not change my notes on which days were worth it and which were a waste of an afternoon. Full policy on the editorial policy page.