Yesterday I had the unique privilege of going to our department staff meeting.  Usually whenever our department has any kind of meeting (or party) I get stuck on the phones.  So, like I said, yesterday I had a unique privilege.  Adding to the singularity of this event, it was not just any old regular department meeting, but a retreat to the family cabin of one of my co-workers, located a few miles outside of Preston, Idaho.  It turns out that Preston is kind of a long way to drive from Salt Lake just for a four hour meeting and lunch, but it was on work time, I didn’t have to drive, and I usually enjoy road trips to obscure locales.  Also, I didn’t really feel like going up the night before and staying over without my wife for the more “retreat” portion of the itinerary.

Beyond the fact that I was getting paid and hanging out with the cool kids, Preston actually turned out to be a very pleasant and beautiful little place.  Between what I’d seen of Southern Idaho from driving on I-84 and my impressions of Preston as it is portrayed in a little indie flick you may or may not remember from a few years back, I had kind of low expectations.  So I was surprised.  Preston shares the pastoral Cache Valley with Logan, Utah, and it’s possible it may actually have the prettier end of it.  The aforementioned family cabin was nestled in rolling mountain foothills next to a nice little reservoir.  The area is pretty much an all-american idyllic landscape.  I can still smell the hay just thinking about the drive to get there.  I’m really wishing I had gotten my camera out and tried to take some pictures, because now I have a head full of barns, rolling hills, tractors, old small town main street storefronts, and brown/purple mountain ranges in all directions.

It was hard not to feel the pressure of one the great cult comedies of my generation weighing down on me as we drove through town.  I felt that perhaps I somehow diminished or stereotyped the town and its good people by hoping for them to conform to my “Hollywood” expectations.  And yet despite such moral misgivings I persisted in my fantasies.  When some of my co-workers were about to go golfing at the close of our meeting day, I suggested that perhaps tetherball would be a more appropriate recreational activity.  I searched storefronts for the famous Deseret Industries thrift store, where in the past such incomparable treasures as nun-chucks, a dance instruction VHS published in 1982, and a really swank polyester suit had been found.  I was tempted to ask the waitress at Pizza Villa, where we ate lunch, if I could have an order of tater tots.  (They have pretty good pizza, by the way.)  I kept my eyes open for a llama.  Over the years I have seen llamas in so many small towns throughout Utah that they have ceased to be very remarkable to me, and yet in Preston I inexplicably kept my eyes open for a llama.  Behind each grassy knoll we passed I expected to see a camper van parked and perhaps a mustachioed man throwing a football into the fields for a camcorder.  As we pulled out of town and started driving south, I truly felt kind of ashamed for my pathetic, touristy behavior in regards to this place.

The gorgeous drive on S.R. 34 northeast of Preston, originally uploaded by Ken Lund.

Since I didn’t have any pictures of Preston to take home with me, I decided to turn to flickr to fulfill my visual needs.  To my surprise I discovered that a good portion of the photos tagged ‘preston idaho’ on flickr pertain directly to scene locales of the allegedly abominable film.  Looking through the images, you will see the school steps upon which a boy drew a liger in a notepad, the house of Pedro, the Rex Kwan Do center, and so on, and so on.  You will also occasionally see glimpses of that idyllic landscape I was talking about.  Upon further research in the sacrosanct annals of Wikipedia, I discovered that Preston has fully embraced this humble motion picture as the central mythos of their town, as it has given rise to an annual grand celebration.  A schedule of events from 2006 indicates a literary/media-inspired ritual that could come to rival even Dublin’s Bloomsday, complete with bus tours of significant filming sites, a moon boot dance contest and tater tot eating contest, and numerous performances by the Happy Hands Club.  I now feel somewhat relieved and vindicated in looking at the environs of Preston through the eyes of Napoleon’s storytellers.  After all, it is not many towns of less than 5,000 residents that are so honored and immortalized with such a sweet film.  I wouldn’t be too surprised if that waitress had brought me out some tater tots without a second’s question if I’d actually asked for them.

Prestonidaho.org – Preston, Idaho Chamber of Commerce Home Page
Photos Taken in Preston, Idaho – flickr.com
Napoleon Dynamite – official site

We met at an art exhibit. We met in the comment section of my blog. We met in a snowstorm in a cottage in the mountains. We met at a symphony concert, sitting next to each other. We met at Family Home Evening and commiserated because we both hated Family Home Evening. We met at the library and traded poems. We met in the Provo temple. We met in empty parking lots and Mexican restaurants and our parents’ houses. We met at a movie theater where we were both making fun of the movie. We met at IKEA, buying bookshelves. We met at an art supply store. We met at a little Chinese place by the hospital. We met on the yellow BART line between San Francisco and Lafayette. We met hiking on a trail in Millcreek Canyon on the last nice autumn day before winter.  We met to shovel snow under the full moon.  We met because we both liked a painting by Brian Kershisnik.

I hate photography. I hate it because I often see potential photographic images, but I rarely am able to get them to actualize into real photographs. I don’t have the time or opportunity at that moment to stop and take a photograph. I can’t get to the right location to get the right view or framing. My little camera gets too shaky and blurs the image. I don’t have the right lenses or equipment. The equipment I do have I am uneducated in how I can use it to effect the outcome of my photographs. My reasons and excuses for failure run on and on and on.

This weekend I went on a trip with my family, up to Grand Teton and Yellowstone. I had become frustrated with my camera, and I sort of decided that I would try to not take any pictures during this vacation. I would just be there and enjoy the moment and not let myself get consumed with these urges to document anything that looks interesting to me. Great things rarely come from following them, anyway, and there are enough pictures of the Tetons already, right?

So, I did good with the not taking pictures thing all afternoon of my first day in the park. I walked around on a shore trail on Jackson lake and it was perfect in real life but the light was so bright on the lake and the mountains so backlit that I knew it wouldn’t be worth taking any pictures. This made it easy to stay with my goal. But later, driving to a different area of the park, my dad stopped the car at a certain point and started taking pictures of the mountains, and I looked over at Mount Moran and I liked the way the light looked on it and the way a little sagebrush ridge came up in front of it, and I wanted to take a picture of it, even though I knew it wouldn’t turn out the way I wanted it to turn out. I hoped the feeling would pass, but my dad kept taking pictures (I think he has the same problem I have, but he hasn’t yet recognized or admitted that it’s a problem). Trouble. Finally, I succumbed and I brought out the camera and took the picture. Then I tried it like six different ways, none of which were that great. Oh well.

As the trip went on I only fell into the trap a few more times. I had to play with the way the mountains were reflecting on String Lake. I had to take pictures of the Tetons and Jackson Lake and the surrounding valley from the classic spot on Signal Mountain. I became mesmerized by the water in Yellowstone Lake, and the only thing that broke my trance was the thought of what the waves and ripples of water would look like if I took pictures of them. And then I had to snap photos of bison in Hayden Valley. And then I had to take pictures of Yellowstone Canyon. But other than that, I was good with my goal.

I think my problem is I want to be a good photographer, but I don’t or can’t put in the time for it. You can’t be a photographer and a tourist. When you are a tourist or sightseer, you get to places when you get to them, and that is your chance to take a photograph, and if its not the right time of day or if there are five hundred people there that is just what you get. Usually there are the other people in your group to consider as well. You try to make it work, and usually you fail. Photography requires a special trip all its own. A certain place must be chosen and studied. The luxury of waiting for the right moment must be provided. You go to a place because it will provide good images at the moment, not because it is convenient or the next on the list. You then achieve the usual postcard image.

However, there is part of me that feels that documenting things as they really are is of value, even if it won’t sell postcards. I looked back at my pictures tonight, and I actually liked a lot of them. Many of the skies you would think were too bright and distorted against the mountains, and yet it expresses what it felt like to look at it exactly. It almost hurts to look into the sun, and in these photos it almost hurts, too. I looked back through some of my other photographs and realized that a lot of my favorites are the mistakes. They are interesting to me, even though they don’t follow the “rule of thirds” (whatever) or they are blurry, or whatever it is. They didn’t turn out the way I had hoped they would, but that doesn’t mean they are not of value. The ones that do turn out the way I expected are sometimes actually quite boring.

So now you can see why I hate photography so much. I hate it because it takes over my mind if I let it. I hate it so much that I am going to have to get a Digital SLR camera and learn how to use it.

[I refrained from including any of the images from my trip on purpose, because I am just kind of a jerk like that. I think I will start posting my photographs on here randomly whenever I feel like it, not in any type of groupings by location or subject. I have threatened to to do it before, but this time I think I will really do it. It will be a help in blogging consistently.]

[I wrote this last night (9/4) on my laptop while the power was out from a windstorm, so I couldn't post it until today.]

Coming soon…

my adventures in Canyonlands.