Finally made it to Holliday Park on the Northwest side of Indianapolis for a shoot two Saturdays ago, thanks to an outing scheduled by the photo club I belong to. We had overcast skies, but squeezed in a two-hour sweep in the afternoon before wrapping things up right before the clouds opened up with another in a series of downpours we'd experienced here that weekend.
We spent most of the time along the nature trails, but everybody makes a point to check out "The Ruins" when they visit Holliday Park, and so did we. Our approach to the shoot embraced the Andy Warhol saying someone penned on a wooden bench (photo at the top): "The world fascinates me."
A quick background on "The Ruins" for out-of-towners who visit this post: This attraction constituted the facade of New York City's first skyscraper, the St. Paul Building, erected in 1898 at 220 Broadway. The figures in the facade, made of Indiana limestone and called "The Races of Man," depicted Caucasian, Asian and African-American races working together to seemingly hold the skyscraper on their backs. In the 1950s, the Western Electric Co., owners of the building, decided to build a more modern structure on the site, so it held a competition among cities interested in bidding for the facade, with the judging criteria based on which bidder would propose the most appealing idea to preserve the facade. Indianapolis won, and it placed the Ruins on the park grounds just south of the nature center. For the full story, visit this website containing a PDF file with the Ruins' history.
Above: The first of four images featuring gnarly works of nature ... 
Above: I liked this more for the seemingly out of place golden leaf at the top than for the gnarly textures. 
Above: First of two gnarly above-ground tree roots, in a black-and-white conversion.
Above: Not a fork in the road, but a bend in the brook. 
Above: The first of four images of The Ruins.
Above: Holliday Park had some nice flowers and foliage ... 
Above: A field of dandelions, from a crawler's perspective. 
... and from a little higher up 
Above: A statuesque way to bring this photographic look at Holliday Park to a conclusion.
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