I've been the Idaho Potato Drop's photographer and videographer for well over 10 years.

A long time ago, I attended the event with a Nikon D3300 and a kit lens. It seemed like a great place to take some photographs, make some mistakes, and learn from them. There were thousands of people there, and I figured I could sink into the background and photograph the event anonymously.

When I got home, I started looking through the images and trying to wrap my head around editing photographs taken in low light. One image caught my attention, and in a strange way, it changed the trajectory of how I approached photography from then on.

There was a guy on stage singing who had this authoritative, almost regal look about him. I probably spent 30 minutes trying to photograph him, waiting for him to walk into parts of the stage where the light was good.

Later that night, after the event was over, I found his photographs while going through everything I'd shot. I realized that one of them was probably the best photograph I'd ever taken. It wasn't entirely because of my talent as a photographer, either. This guy was just incredibly photogenic.

So I tried to find him on the internet. I wanted to figure out who he was so I could photograph him again someday, preferably at another venue where I'd have another chance at getting it right.

I couldn't find him.

So I did something I normally wouldn't have done in a million years: I emailed the Idaho Potato Drop. I sent them a picture of this mystery guy and asked if they could tell me who he was.

They invited me to the IPD office to show them some of the photographs I'd taken of The Drop, including the pictures of the guy I was trying to track down.

As a side note, it isn't particularly unusual for photographers, artists, or journalists to become interested in a specific person and try to find them again. Journalists do it for stories. In my case, I just wanted another chance to photograph someone I found visually interesting.

Anyway, I sat down with someone from the Idaho Potato Drop and started showing him the photographs. Eventually I pointed to several pictures of my mystery guy.

I finally got my answer.

He looked at the photographs and said, "That's me!"

And it was.

That's how I met Dylan Cline, and later Sandi Nahas.

I've been photographing the Idaho Potato Drop for them—and for my own growth as a photographer—ever since. Over the years I've also made two movies about the event, each about an hour long.

Photographing the Idaho Potato Drop encouraged me to take photography and videography much more seriously. It's still a hobby, but over time I've become increasingly interested in chasing the art, humanity, and beauty of the human condition, and in using technology to document as much of it as I can.

There's something else I've learned along the way that I think is worth saying.

Nobody gets everything right the first time. Sometimes we don't get it right the second or third time, either. We make mistakes. We learn from them. We take responsibility for the things we got wrong, do everything we can to make them better, and then we move forward.

Photography isn't much different.

The gallery below represents only a fraction of the tens of thousands of photographs I've taken during more than a decade at the Idaho Potato Drop.

About ten of these photographs were taken by Stacey Budden—an enigma, and a wonderful human being.