WHO WE ARE
ABOUT DÉRIVE
We're Lindsey and Taylor, photographers and co-founders based in Whistler, BC. Lindsey has called this mountain home for over 20 years. Taylor was born here. The mountains shaped us, but travel changed us.
Curiosity became the compass. Unfamiliar places, languages we couldn't speak, coastlines we'd never seen — the further we got from comfortable the better the photographs got.
We started Dérive Collective to capture all of it — the daily magic on Whistler and Blackcomb that locals know by heart, and the landscapes that pulled us in everywhere else.
We shoot what moves us and print everything in Canada because quality matters as much as the image itself. This is for the people who want those places on their walls.
“My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.”
– Steve McCurry
LINDSEY CANTWELL
Photography has been part of my life since I was old enough to flip through my grandfather's photo albums — meticulous records of every place he and my grandmother ever travelled. That careful attention to remembering stuck with me.
What started as documentation — a refusal to forget the good places and the good days — became something I couldn't put down.
I moved to Whistler at 18, chasing the mountain life I'd seen in ski movies and felt on the slopes of Mount Washington. Twenty years later I'm still here, still skiing, still shooting.
My work lives in the details most people walk past — chairlifts, morning light, the feeling of a run before anyone else is on it. I'm not chasing perfection. I'm chasing the moment just before you forget it.
That's always been enough.
taylor laidlaw
Taylor was born in Whistler — this mountain is home in the truest sense.
She's a designer by trade, founder of Opal Creative Co., and the catalyst behind Dérive Collective. She built the website, shaped the identity, and turned a shared vision into something real — the reason any of this exists beyond a hard drive full of photographs.
She shoots for colour — the warmth of a Tuscan hillside, the turquoise of a Mexican bay, the golden light of the Amalfi Coast. Places that stay with you long after you've left.
She prefers sunny days on the mountain. We don't hold it against her.