Visiting Hendricks County, Part I

Friday was a mini-epic day for me, photographically speaking. I spent nine hours on the road and in Hendricks County, the county due west of Indianapolis. I was on a kind of reconnaissance mission to scope out the 60-mile course for the inaugural Park2Park Relay Race on June 25. Members of the Indy Meetup Photo Club will be photographing the team-oriented event, a fundraiser for the Hendricks County Parks Foundation and Hendricks County Parks Department.

Teams of six runners in eight classifications (men, women, mixed, open, over 40) will take turns running 3- to 4-mile legs, starting at 6:30 a.m. in McCloud Nature Park, which is southwest of North Salem, and finish sometime in the afternoon or early evening in the new Sodalis Nature Park near Plainfield. There will be 18 legs in all, and each team will be allowed to have one team car to follow runners, to transport the inactive runners to facilitate the exchanges (switches) at the designated exchange points.

My posts over the next several days will reflect my shoots during the course of my recon mission, which actually started in Danville -- which I went through en route to McCloud Nature Park. I couldn't help but stop and photograph the county courthouse and courthouse square. Those have been on my list of things to do since I started in Feburary with the courthouses in Jefferson and Scott counties while making my sojourn to Hanover and Clifty Falls State Park. Since then, I added Hamilton County, and for fun, I'm going to see how many more I can amass when time permits.

Today's post is from inside the Hendricks County Courthouse, leading off at the top with a wide-angle view of the circular opening on the top of three floors ... and the mosaic rotunda above it. I bracketed all of my shots on this trip for treatment in high-dynamic range (HDR) software. In this post, however, I'll present only single-frame versions of the images; I'll present the HDR versions in the next post. You can decide later whether you prefer these or the HDR versions. Maybe you'll find merit in both.