Singling out 15 favorite photo shoots to mark this blog's 15th anniversary

As of last month, Photo Potpourri has been around for 15 years. The anniversary passed quietly; I’d actually forgotten about it until a few days ago. 

Once I did remember, I tried to think about what I could do to mark the occasion. It occurred to me that I’ve never done a post about my favorite shoots over the years, so I thought that picking out 15 such outings would be a good way to mark the anniversary. So without further adieu, here are 15 shoots that stand out to me, and I present them in no particular order.

Hendricks County Park2Park 64-Mile Team Run — There were two of these that I participated in and organized for the Indy Meetup Photo Club, June 2011 and June 2012. The first one I remember the best because of the extensive prep work I did. I traveled the whole 64-mile course two weeks in advance of the event to gauge which points along the course would be the best places to assign club members to get pictures. Then I presented my plan to the IMUPC at a meeting the week of the run. Most club members were asked to stay in one location so they didn't have to expend a lot of time and vehicle fuel running around. I assigned myself to follow the full course in gradual increments throughout the day, and I found it quite a thrill. This was the only shoot ever in which I experienced my primary camera (a Canon 7D) overheating and refusing to perform. Fortunately, that didn’t happen until I had reached the finish point, and even better, I was smart enough to have brought a backup camera (a Canon 30D) to finish any shooting I needed to do.

The 2012 rendition was interesting because the Hendricks County Parks Foundation reversed the course direction (the 2011 finish park was the 2012 start point, and the 2011 start park was the 2012 finish point) it and added an ultra-marathon category, requiring a start of that competition before sunrise. One of my favorite shots from the 2011 Park2Park was the one above, a silhouette of three women on the open road, Hendricks County Road 650 North, early in the event just outside of the town of North Salem.  

Garfield Shakespeare Company’s fall 2012 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — I enjoyed all my shoots of community theater in Indianapolis, but this one was a particular delight for me because my son, Ben, auditioned for a role and was cast as King Theseus. Adding to the pleasure was that I was tipped off that there would be a surprise wedding proposal, involving two cast members, at a late-morning Saturday practice at Garfield Park's MacAllister Amphitheater. The plan was for the man to drop to his knee and propose during the rehearsal of a scene. It went off splendidly, a good time was had by all and practice was paused so all could enjoy some celebratory cake and camaraderie.

Below are two "Midsummer" photos. The first features my son, Ben, as Theseus, along with Lexie Brown (middle) as Hippolyta and Christy Walker as Hermia, from the Sept. 19 dress rehearsal. The second is from the moment Spencer Elliott dropped to his knee to propose to Ashley Chase on the Sept. 9 morning practice. 

Neighborhood profiles of Lockerbie Square and the Old Northside of Indianapolis — In 2007, I took an advanced photography class through the adult learning department of Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. For our last project, teacher Greg Mitchell had class members do a photo walk-through of the historic and scenic Lockerbie Square neighborhood on downtown Indy’s near Eastside. I so much enjoyed the experience that I threw myself into a similar project that the Indy Meetup Photo Club decided to tackle in the Old Northside neighborhood of Indianapolis. Those experiences no doubt led to my current interest of visiting various towns and communities to do a photo documentary walk-through. 

The first photo below was from a trip I made to Lockerbie Square about a week before the class outing. The two photos below it were two shots from my visit to the Old Northside in June 2011. 

The Florida Keys — I've taken two trips to the Florida Keys, one in January 2017, the other in February 2018. On both trips, we stayed in Marathon in the middle of the Keys to allow for relatively short access to Key West on the far south end and Key Largo on the far north end, even though I suspected that we'd probably spend the bulk of our time in Marathon and Key West. And we did. However, we did spend a night in Key Largo halfway through the two-week trip in 2017, and that's where I captured my favorite photo of both journeys, the sunset shot over the Gulf of Mexico in the first image below. This is the original version of the photo, by the way. I've since made and saved a copy after erasing the two poles to the left of the sun. I go back and forth on which I prefer. Today, I was preferring the original. 

The second shot below was during our trip to Bahia Honda State Park, which is south of Marathon on the far end of the Overseas Highway 7-Mile Bridge. I've never been as fortunate to recapture the open sea looking as stunning as the Atlantic Ocean appeared that day.

Covering the Monon Bell Classic football game between Wabash College and DePauw University — I made a point to do this twice, once at each campus. The first came at DePauw in Greencastle, Ind., in 2011, and the second the following year at Wabash, a modest jog north of Greencastle on U.S. 231 in Crawfordsville, Ind. I could use any number of game-action photos to illustrate my shoot at these games, both of which were won by Wabash, but the games are played for the prize — possession of the Monon Bell, which is why I present the one below from the 2012 game at Crawfordsville. 

Butler University men's basketball team — I became a pretty dedicated Bulldogs basketball fan in the early 2000s, when head coach Brad Stevens molded one winning team after another and took consecutive teams to the final game of the NCAA tournament. I had the fortune to have photographed three Butler games at storied Hinkle Fieldhouse — one against Indiana State in 2007 and exhibitions against DePauw in 2009 and Hanover College in 2010. I got my best shots in the latter two, but my favorites are displayed below, both from the 2009 game against DePauw. 

The first shows Bulldogs guard Shawn Vanzant (2) attempting a left-handed pass around a DePauw defender, while the second features future NBA player Gordon Hayward going up for a two-handed jam to climax a solo breakaway sprint down the court in the second half. 

  

Indianapolis Cycling Criterium — Sticking to the realm of sports, I became a fan of cycling right around the new millennium, so in 2010, I decided to go to downtown Indianapolis for the debut of the annual Indy Criterium and see how well I could capture the sport in photographs. Personally, I think I did pretty good. I always found things to tweak and improve upon with my subsequent shoots of the 2011 and 2012 Indy Crits as well as the 2011 Mass Ave Criterium.

My favorite from the 2010 Crit isn't an action shot; it's this playful moment (first photo below) by one entrant as he was lined up to at the start line moments before his race began. I never went to these races looking (much less hoping) for accidents to happen, but in the 2012 Indy Crit, I was in the right place at the right time (second photo below). I got lots of shots of this accident on Market Street just west of Monument Circle when it unfolded as riders approached my position. My shots included some closeups of the unfortunate MacDonald's rider's bloodied face and left knee after he left the course, but I elected to present one of the action shots of the accident unfolding here instead. 

Spectators at a show by Indy area band the Bishops — I had occasion to photograph many concerts in Indianapolis while I was living there. I eventually was hired to shoot The Bishops on several occasions, but none was as exciting or memorable as a performance at Mickey's Irish Pub in Carmel on Jan. 14, 2012. That shoot just so happened to coincide with my first occasion to christen a new L series Canon lens, the 24-70mm f/2.8. That's what I was using when I captured my favorite shot at the show (below), a few excited women who were dancing in front of the stage and, specifically, in front of lead guitarist Matt Ley. I got a lot of nice shots of the band in action, too, but I always come back to this one when I think of my sundry concert shoots through the years. 

Indy Acoustic Cafe series — Also in the realm of music and concerts, I was able to photograph 17 artists who performed at the long-running Indy Acoustic Cafe series during a period when it was staging most of its shows in Fountain Square, a short jaunt from my home in the Garfield Park area. Artists in my Indy Acoustic Cafe portfolio include Tom Rush, David Lindley, Rory Block, Shawn Mullins, Jonathan Edwards, former Little Feat band member Patrick Fuller, Freedy Johnston and Darden Smith. 

I saw Mullins twice there; the first was in 2011 with my children, who were acquainted with the stuff of his that reached the pop charts. I didn't photograph that first show, but I did get the second show, on Feb. 12, 2012, and that's where I got the first photo below, my favorite from that appearance. I loved the expression on Mullins' face as Patrick Blanchard, who played bass in Mullins' usual band and joined him on stage for this show, takes a lead solo. 

The second photo below is from the Nov. 19, 2011, series show starring James House. I happened to catch House at a great moment in an intense point of a song's lyrics. In the Jan. 29, 2011, show by Darden Smith, stage lighting darkened to a point where I felt inspired to process a few images in dramatic silhouette. That's what I did in the third photo below. I also cast a copy of this in a blue tint to add to my "blues" monochrome collection. 

My second published photo: Cathy Morris playing the Garfield Park Sunken Garden — In June 2005, I'd had my first DSLR for almost a year and decided to walk over to the park and see what I could capture during a concert in the Garfield Park Sunken Garden by Indy electric violinist Cathy Morris and her jazz ensemble. Cathy stood on the garden's overlook while the audience sat below in the Sunken Garden itself. The photo below was beyond what I hoped to capture, using my digital Rebel (300D) and a standard 75-300mm f/4.5-6 lens at maximum focal range from below in the garden. I decided to offer it to my employer, The Indianapolis Star, to use in the next day's newspaper, and they used it in black and white (there was no color available) on Page 2 of the City/State Metro news section. It was the second time The Star had published a photo of mine; the first depicted extensive damage along Troy Avenue on the Southside of Indianapolis after a 2004 Memorial Day tornado swept through the city. The editors like that photo so much that they ran it five columns wide on the jump page of the main storm story for the first edition. The sweet thing about that picture was that I shot it on color film and had to get the film processed and prints made before scanning the image onto my computer. 

Savannah, Georgia — I've made more trips to Savannah than any other place outside of my home state except for Myrtle Beach. But Savannah holds a special place in my heart. Every trip there, I come back with pictures I treasure for days. So it's difficult to single out any one shoot from my days days venturing out into this beautiful and historic Southern community. So I'll present three.

The first below is a shot looking south of the gorgeous fountain in Forsyth Park, the largest and southernmost of almost two dozen neighborhood squares in the historic district. My first visit to Savannah came in March 2017, and March is prime azalea season in Georgia. Beautiful and (again) historic Bonaventure Cemetery (where "Moon River" songwriter Johnny Mercer is buried) has many, many azaleas that give its premises a visual lift in spring, as evidenced in the second photo below. I haven't written a whole lot about the City Market in downtown Savannah, so in the third photo below, I present a look at the City Market down Saint Julian Street in March 2017.  

Myrtle Beach — As noted previously, I've to Myrtle Beach quite a bit since moving to North Carolina. It's the place where I've photographed the vast majority of the sunrises I've amassed over the years. So in addition to the photo leading off the post, I'll present the following Myrtle Beach photos below, captured at various times. 

Visits to Indiana small-college campuses — During my "Game Day" project, which encompassed shooting football along with campus landscapes at small colleges and universities in Indiana (the shoots for the Monon Classic mentioned above were part of this), I found myself pleasingly surprised at what so many Indiana small campuses had to offer. I started at Hanover College, whose campus overlooks the Ohio River in southern Indiana, and with so many others after that, I kept being impressed by what these schools did to make themselves visually and aesthetically appealing. I probably was most surprised by my visit to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute. I'm not sure why I went there with low expectations, but I did, and boy, was I way off. It's up there with Hanover and Anderson University among the top three that impressed me most.

For Hanover, I could go the easy route and show a shot I took of the Ohio River from the campus bluffs, but instead, I'll present the first photo below, a backlit image of a campus fountain, which was among my favorites of the shoot. The second photo is a section of The Valley, Anderson University’s hilly "substitute" for green open malls found at most campuses. The third photo is Speed Lake at Rose-Hulman, with Percopo Hall in the background on the left and White Chapel on the right.  

Lakes Wheeler and Benson in Raleigh — Within relatively close driving distance from my home outside Raleigh are Lake Wheeler and Benson Lake. Within a few days of each other in 2018, I visited both up close for the first time, and enjoyed both shoots for difference reasons. At Wheeler, I found a second body of water, Simpkins Pond, kind of hidden from the big lake. Simpkins had lots of interesting elements to photograph, although my favorite shot of the day was actually taken from just outside the park — along a street guard railing looking back toward the big lake and its spillover, where the serendipitous scene with the geese in the first photo below unfolded. I happened to be there at just the right time. Right below that image is a shot from the many I took as I circled the "hidden" Simpkins Pond. As for Benson, I went there early enough on a day when the water was still, the sun was shining, some clouds were out and I got great cloud reflections on the water.

 

Garfield Park, Indianapolis, in winter — Many of my favorite shots in this "go to" park during my days in Indianapolis were taken in winter. Below, wrapping up this anniversary post, are several of these. 

A salute to the late Governor Davis

I’ve been out of Indiana for six and a half years now, so it’s not surprising that I would be detached from a lot of Indianapolis-area news in that period unless I were subscribing to an Indiana news outlet.

I elected not to continue my IndyStar online subscription after moving, and for the most part, I hadn’t felt like I missed a lot.

But in the days since composing my previous post, the one commemorating blues musician Gene Deer, I’ve learned that another Indy community blues stalwart, 73-year-old Governor Davis, had died in October 2021 of Covid-related complications. And given how huge of a blues stalwart that Davis was and how much I enjoyed his shows, I figured I owed him a post here, too.

I’d seen Davis and his longtime band, the Blues Ambassadors, perform many times at the Slippery Noodle Inn in Indianapolis. Davis was a delightful showman known for wearing colorful threads and a wide-brimmed fedora and for taking his cordless guitar and making forays into the audience to play up close and personal. It wasn’t hard for him to get customers to dance at their tables, in the aisles and — during the late set at the Slippery Noodle when attendance had thinned to half a dozen to a dozen — on the bench seats of the front stage. It was crazy good fun, in fact.

Governor Davis and the Blues Ambassadors had two tracks on the 1994 Slippery Noodle Sound live-performance compilation CD, and both are fantastic. A wonderful pumping bass riff drives “Faith,” and the danceable Elmore James classic “Shake Your Money Maker” was an enjoyable Governor Davis concert staple.

He and the Blues Ambassadors also had two CDs, both issued by JK Publishing — “I Am the Governor” in 1997 and “Live” in 2001. 

The Governor (which was his real name) was born in Chicago and grew up around blues music at Chicago clubs because his father, also named Governor, worked in car repair and his customers included many Chicago blues musicians, so dad got to play piano in the clubs. 

At the urging of his father who wanted his son to get “a real job” (i.e., not vehicle repair), Governor moved to Indiana and enrolled in two-year Vincennes University, where he studied social work and played in several music ensembles, according to his obituary. He finished his studies at Ball State University in Muncie, where he taught himself how to play guitar, sat in with local bands and learned the art of performance. He got his degree there in 1977.

After brief employment in social work, he elected to work as a musician full time, and the rest is history. He made Muncie his home, and played there, in Indianapolis, Lafayette and in other locales in the Midwest and beyond. He and the Blues Ambassadors took a break from each other circa 2012 when the Governor sought medical help to figure out why he was experiencing bouts of mental health lows. 

After being diagnosed as Type 2 bipolar and taking some time off from the stage, he returned to performing, but not with Blues Ambassadors. The Governor Davis Blues Band was born. Today, there is a Blues Ambassadors band, based in central Indiana, performing with the Governor’s longtime guitarist Steve Robbins. (Longtime bassist Jose Joven, 74, died in November 2023.)

Like the photos I used for my post on Gene Deer, I took the photos in this post on April 20, 2011, at the Slippery Noodle Inn, which was hosting a memorial and benefit blues jam for Jerry Booth, front man for for the Indy blues band Mean Weenies. Booth (aka Jerry Blues) had died on April 15.

RIP Gene Deer, longtime Indiana blues musician, composer, band leader

When I did a post here in April 2011 about a memorial tribute jam for blues musician Jerry Booth, a jam at which I had taken pictures, it did not occur to me that I might turn to those photos again years down the road to commemorate yet another member of the Indy blues community.

But that is just what happened recently.   

Booth (aka Jerry Blues) was the front man for the Mean Weenies, a group I had seen only a time or two at the time of the tribute jam at the Slippery Noodle Inn in Indianapolis. But I sensed that artists I knew much better would turn out for the jam, which is why I sought and obtained Slippery Noodle Inn owner Hal Yeagy’s blessing to photograph the event.

Just a few days ago, the Noodle posted on its social media accounts news of the passing of Gene Deer, 59, a stalwart of the Indy blues community and one of my favorite performers that I'd seen in my many visits to the Noodle over the years. 

Gene performed at the Booth tribute jam (he’s the recurring musician in all the photos from that tribute in this post), so I’m pleased to say I got some quality images of him on stage. 

And, yes, indeed many local blues stalwarts did turn up to participate in the tribute jam; in addition to Deer, there was Gordon Bonham; Governor Davis; Scotty Thomas (aka Scotty Gun), who had played with Booth in the Mean Weenies; Sweet Lou Rapier; violinist Allison Irvine; Smokin' Dave Wyatt; drummers Jeff Chapin and Joe Means; and bassist Henry "Chief" Connelly (who died in October 2021). Below are Deer (left), Connelly and Irvine.

I first saw Deer perform at the Slippery Noodle Inn in the early 1990s, and soon afterward also saw him at Zanies Too on Indy’s Eastside, a venue that proved to be Deer's home base, if such a place could be nominated. He played there often -- sometimes multiple times a week -- and hosted many a Zanies blues jam.

Years after I first saw him play I learned that he had played in the popular 1980s Indianapolis band Coda as early as 1984. (I own an Indy blues music compilation cassette tape, issued in 1989 by the former Blues Society of Indiana, that contains the song “Pay the Rent” by Coda.) Also part of Coda were bassist Tom Beckleheimer and drummer Joe Means. 

Coda disbanded in late 1989; Beckleheimer eventually landed with Red Beans and Rice, while Deer, Means, keyboardist James Taylor and former Duke Tumatoe bassist Larry Barber formed the Generators, beginning in 1990. That collaboration was short-lived, however. 

By April 1992, Deer was performing numerous gigs billed as Gene Deer and the Groove Merchants, an association that lasted into 1995, the year he and his ensembles began a nine-year run of being named best Indianapolis blues band by Nuvo weekly publication. It was a period that solidified his reputation as an Indy blues community heavyweight. 

In the late 1990s, the Groove Merchants gave way to the Gene Deer Blues Band, featuring Deer, Means, Connelly and keyboardist John Wesley Smith, although there would be many collaborators and iterations through the years as evidenced by the individual song artist credits on his 1997 CD "Livin' With the Blues" (more on this below). 

Deer also was talented enough to attract gigs performing as a solo act, and he periodically logged stints hosting the Slippery Noodle’s Wednesday night jam sessions at which any musician could show up, sign in and share time showing their chops on the stage during the night. 

In May 1997, Deer even appeared with The Spirtles, a popular Indy area band, and national singer and keyboardist Merl Saunders, a longtime cohort of and collaborator with the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, for at least one performance at Irving's Water Bowl north of Muncie. 

In 2002, 1999 Indy 500-Mile Race champion and guitar-playing Kenny Brack signed Deer to be band leader of Kenny Brack and the Subwoofers, which toured with the Indy Racing League in 2003. The Subwoofers released a benefit CD “Live in Nashville” that featured former Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Ed King. The album was a compilation of live recordings before an Indy Racing League race at Nashville Superspeedway in July of that year. In 2007, Deer toured South Africa with an England-based support band called the Raging Calm.

I saw Deer, which The Indianapolis Star described as “arguably the hardest-working blues artist in Indianapolis,” at the Slippery Noodle many times in the 1990s. On a couple of occasions in the 2000s, I brought out-of-town family with me to the tavern if and when he performed there on Thanksgiving weekends, which happened a few times. Twice I got lucky when both he and Gordon Bonham's bands played the Noodle on the same Thanksgiving weekend. Note: The Noodle has two stages, one in front, the other in back. They were connected by a long narrow hallway but separated with enough distance that one performer’s music would not disturb the other’s. Part of the unique SNI experience on two-act live-performance weekends was that customers had the ability to go back and forth between stages to enjoy both bands at some point during an evening. The bands’ start times were staggered so that breaks also were staggered, guaranteeing that there always was at least one band performing at all times.

I reviewed Deer’s first CD, “Soul Tender,” for The Indianapolis Star when it was released in 1994 on Slippery Noodle’s then-new record label, Slippery Noodle Sound. It was a fine collections of tunes, with my favorites being "Whisper in My Ear," "Don't Turn Your Back on the Blues" and "Midnight Healing." 

Slippery Noodle Sound released “Livin’ With the Blues,” Deer’s second CD, three years later in 1997. Deer dedicated the album to his father, Gene Paul Deer, who had died in October 1996. "I wanted to be a guitar player since I was a kid, and my dad was always a proud pop," Deer said in the dedication on the back side of the album sheet. 

Although "Livin' With the Blues" attributes the artist to "Gene Deer & the Blues Band," album song credits reflect an amalgam of talent helping out. Bill Mallers handles keyboards on all tracks, and Jeff Stone is on bass for all but two tracks. Keith Young handles percussion on "Too Far Gone." Darrell Cox is on drums, Geoff Bushor on bass and Byron Graves on harp for "One Foot on the Road"; former Coda bandmate Beckleheimer is on bass for "Smokestack Lightning"; and Cox is on drums again for "Can't Afford to Pay the Rent," "Blues in the Afternoon" and "Dreams." Rick Bole is on drums for all other tracks. 

"Livin' With the Blues" contains a reprise of the Coda "Pay the Rent" song found on the Blues Society of Indiana cassette compilation. The improvement in sound quality on the CD version is immediately apparent, and Deer's 1997 treatment of the song is wonderfully refreshing. The CD version also expands the song title to "Can't Afford to Pay the Rent."

Another 19 years passed before Deer self-released his third and final album, “Trippin’ Delta,” in 2016.

In 1994, Slippery Noodle Sound included Deer and the Groove Merchants on its second of four live blues compilations recorded at the downtown Indy blues bar and again, in 2013, on the fourth compilation, a three-disc set marking the bar’s 50th anniversary under the Yeagy family ownership. (That family ownership extended another 10 years; Hal Yeagy, who took over the bar from his father in 1984, died of cancer in December 2020, and his widow, Carol, sold the bar in March 2023.)

I learned of Deer's passing early this month via posts on Slippery Noodle's Facebook and Instagram accounts: 

It is with heavy hearts that we have to share the news of the sudden passing of Gene Deer. He was an icon in the Indy music scene and beyond. He was a beloved member of the Slippery Noodle family. His great smile and energy made every one he touched a better person. He will be deeply missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family. RIP Gene!

Circumstances and details of his death were not initially disclosed, but on Dec. 30, Gene issued a post on his Facebook account announcing that he and his band would have to cancel a show scheduled for the next day at American Legion Post 355 on the Far-Southside of Indianapolis because he was "still very sick." He did not elaborate. The SNI and family members announced his death a few days into the new year, and a few days after that, an acquaintance of Deer posted on Facebook that authorities had determined Deer had contracted shingles and died of resultant sepsis. 

Deer’s calling and funeral services were scheduled for Friday, Jan. 12, at Flanner Buchanan Washington Park East Community Life Center, 10612 E. Washington St., Indianapolis. He was to be buried in Washington Park East Cemetery.

An article at www.nuvo.net reports that two known public celebrations of life for Deer are planned. The first will be a tribute jam and fundraiser at the Slippery Noodle, beginning at 7 p.m., on Jan. 24. 

The Rathskeller in downtown Indianapolis, where Gene performed his last gig on Dec. 23, announced it will hold a three-hour memorial and fundraiser in its Grand Kellersaal Ballroom for the Deer family from 5 to 8 p.m. Jan. 28. Donations will be accepted at the door. 

In addition, Matthew Socey’s Blues House Party radio show will air a tribute to Deer at 7 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 13, on WFYI-FM (90.1) in Indianapolis.

Above, Deer, Irvine, Wyatt and Bonham (left to right) together on the Slippery Noodle's rear stage. In the three photos below, Deer with Bonham trade lead and solo guitar licks. 

To view a full gallery of images from the jam, follow the link in this sentence.