Last night started the 45th Annual National Polka Festival from Ennis, Texas. I’m not going to post a bunch of photos here on my blog but you can see the photos on my Flickr Set for the National Polka Festival. This festival is something we try to go to every year, and it’s an event Deborah has gone to since she was about 3 or 4 years old. Unfortunately it hasn’t changed much since she was 3 or 4 years old, but it’s still quite fun to celebrate her Czech heritage with others. I just wish the promoters and people in charge of marketing the festival would recognize we are no longer in the 1970′s and make a better attempt to pass along an important event and heritage to the younger generation. It’s time!
I’m not in charge of course but I do work in communicating a message, communicating a way of life that has to be passed from one generation to another in order to survive, and there are some similarities to this and my own ministry. I totally understand their desire to maintain tradition, and that’s important, but each year that goes by the festival promoters attempt to remember the past, not necessarily the traditions, and do nothing to bring in the youngest generation.
Case in point, I go to the SOKOL (the starting hall last night), open Foursquare, no venue checkin. Fine, I create one, take a pic, upload it, now I’m Mayor (haha). I take some photos, go to upload them to Flickr. There is no Flickr group, so I create one (Polka Festival). The only pics on Flickr that show up are from 2 years ago when I posted them, ok, I’ll post a few more. There is no chatter on Twitter, none on Facebook (none that I can find officially from the NPF website, thought they do have a Facebook page, very commendable), and zero, I mean zero computers or other connected devices at the event. Of course there is no wifi (I brought my own) so it wouldn’t make much sense to have a “device” anyway. And, not to embarrass anyone at all, but, all you have to do is take one look at the National Polka Festival website and you get the whole picture. I mean really, come on guys, pay some high school kid $250 to update your website? Do a google search for the “National Polka Festival” and after the official site I’m number 2 and 3 on Google’s list, and I have nothing to do with the festival at all. So far, what they did do differently is bring in a “magician” for the weekend. It would take a whole completely different blog post to explain the things I think are wrong about that, but oh well. We have given it several years and we will probably not come back after this 2011 festival, instead opting to go to Nebraska where at least it will be a new experience.
I say none of this to chastise the festival but in an attempt to give them an outside, objective, perspective on the festival in hopes they will embrace the younger generation so it won’t completely die off… and I’m NOT the younger generation just in case they are reading this, I’m over 40, so you need to be ahead of what I’m talking about. I’ll get off my soapbox now, that’s my free advice to the NPF people in charge.
So, today there is a parade, venders, and Czech dancing and food at all three halls. I will be sure to ruin my diet by eating all the great German and Czech food available, and I’m sure we will enjoy our time at the festival today. For photos of the event just check out my Flickr page. You can also see posts from the previous years 2010, 2009, Saturday Parade 2008, 2008, 2007, Saturday 2006, and 2006.
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So we made it to Dallas, just a quick 12-13 hour drive and we arrived. The trip was pleasantly uneventful and after dinner I was thrilled our hosts wanted to stop at their favorite skyline view so I could take some photos. I love photographing traffic at night, it has a unique motion all it’s own, but being here in Dallas standing over the I-30 bridge with a large tripod looked conspicuous to someone driving by and it only took about 10 minutes before the Dallas Police Department showed up. For once the police didn’t make me pack it up and go home, instead she just wanted to know how much my camera cost? The three above were my favorite of that shoot. At dinner tonight I found out I am going to get to go to the PGA Byron Nelson Championship, so hopefully I will get my first decent PGA Tour shots while I’m there, after that it’s Polka time.
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After shooting in Auburn for more than five years now I had never been over to the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, and it was quite nice. They were very gracious to allow me to shoot in the non-art areas of the museum and the architecture made for some great shots. I would have loved to have gone in with my tripod and been able to really setup and get some details in each room but maybe another time when they need some shots for the city or something. Anyway, if you are in Auburn it’s a nice quiet place with some very nice pieces and I finally got to use my fisheye lens on some clean walls.
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Every month we have a meeting where the entire staff gets together for lunch, but this Tuesday, everyone headed over to the Auburn Bowling Alley for a game instead of our normal “meeting”. It was loads of fun and a great break from the normal routine of things. That first shot is the whole motley crew, including my bald head (thanks Ashley Coxwell for taking the shot), seems everyone on staff is a professional bowler, we just happened to have missed a few pins for some reason. This particular all-staff meeting was said to be a “surprise” so none of us knew what was going on until we were told where to drive to for lunch. I love a staff that cherishes some down time, even if it’s just 90 minutes at the bowling alley. I hadn’t been bowling in probably 10 years but it was a blast. The are tons more photos but I’m saving those for ransom later in the summer.
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You can find photographic opportunities literally everywhere, these were within walking distance of my house and I’m now thinking they actually look better as a photograph than they do as I walk by every day. I must have looked at these old cars for 5 years, every single day, and never thought about capturing some images until a few days ago. These trucks have seen a lot of my personal history over the years, and at some point I’ll try to get back in there closer so I can avoid all the weeds. I’m thinking about making the middle shot into a nice 16×24 print. I would like to say I have something profound to write about junk and possessions and storing up treasures in heaven where moth and rust don’t eat your vintage trucks but they were really just cool trucks sitting in the dirt being overtaken and claimed by the earth once again.
On another subject, this weeks is going to be another crazy crazy busy week, but towards the end of the week Deb and I will be heading out to Dallas for the annual National Polka Festival. We try to go every year but we missed it last year. Hopefully by Wednesday I will be posting some news about an upcoming trip in July, and then my blog will probably turn into the family trip blog on I-20 from Alabama to Texas. This time we are making the 750 mile trip in one day and I will probably attempt to max out our Verizon MiFi on the way out of boredom. I am looking forward to bringing back a bunch more images than I have in the past, for some reason, perhaps because of everything going on at the end of last year, I have keen desire for sheer photographic documentation.
Summer certainly seems to be here at this point in Auburn. We can’t seem to get out of these upper 95* days (although it seems really early for that), and everyone seems to have scattered to the wind like they always do once school lets out. This trip to Dallas is actually going to be our first trip out of the area since about January 2010. As a person who once loved to travel, I’m a bit apprehensive about this trip and others coming up this summer. Time to let go and give it up to God and let him handle the worrying, but I would appreciate your prayers, at least for this coming weekend.
Coming up, hopefully tomorrow, is a shoot from the Museum of Fine Art in Auburn, info about a trip coming up in July, and then it’s on to Polka days.
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It’s Friday, and since we didn’t go anywhere exciting today other than to drive over to Columbus, my Friday Feet pic is rather boring, but there were some “great” church signs along the way as usual.
I have a pretty additive habit-hobby of church sign reading, sometimes it’s just like train wreck TV, you just can’t turn away. It is, at least in the south, a method of communication for local churches, and for Christianity in general (a very very broad range version of general). Since we spend so much time contemplating, discussing, and meeting about communication in our staff meetings at my own church I have no doubt that many of the church signs I see and read are not accidental. Church signs represent as broad a range of Christianity as their are Christians, and it shows. I just wonder if they at least think about the greater message they are presenting to the drive-by sign reader. I’m sure not everyone reads every single church sign they drive by like I do, but still, what message are you trying to communicate to the casual non-church-goer reading your sign? I have nothing against any of these churches of course, I’m sure their all great churches… but the last 2-3 weeks I have driven by this one church they have had two different, negative signs, which drives me nuts, but I’m not on their communication team, so oh well.
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Don’t know how your week has been but my week has been so busy that today was the first day I actually had a chance to get these photos posted from my shoot last weekend.
I love doing a photowalk through local graveyards. Here in Alabama (and I guess everywhere) we have these small family graveyards dotted all around the area. Each one tells an incredible story, and the stories often span a historical period of hundreds of years. This may sound strange to some but they are almost always quiet, peaceful places where traffic is light and little has changed over the decades and time just seems to slow down when you walk through.
This graveyard is real close to my house and is typical of the local family graveyards around our area. There are almost as many infants, babies, and youth in this spot as there are adults. Most of the smallest graves are unmarked and very old at this point. The earliest birth year here was late 1600′s so this little tract has been in this one family, sitting just like this, for over 300 years. There are a lot of houses in our area that were built around the Civil War era, and this spot has a tiny little building/house/shack on it. I try to image who would have lived in this little building, which is smaller than the smallest room in my house.
Each one is different, each one tells a different story.
