A salute to Hershel Saylor, the photo club colleague with the 3D camera

In the early part of the 2010s, I was an active member of two photography clubs in Indianapolis. On Saturday, while perusing some pictures of mine from that era, I happened to think of a particular fellow who was a member of one of the clubs, the Indy Meetup Photo Club. So I went online to see if I could find a way to contact him just to see how he was doing.

In my search for that one piece of information, I was saddened to learn something entirely different about Hershel Saylor: He had passed away in 2020, almost five years to the day. 

Hershel was someone from the club who stuck with me through the years because of a photographic innovation of his — and I think he told me he concocted it himself — which was to shoot three dimensional photos. The tool, or camera, he used to do this was actually two cameras connected side by side. Every composition he made appeared on each camera’s LCD screen, side by side (see photo leading off the post).  

I don't recall studying his results back then to know or appreciate whether the 3D objective really worked or succeeded, but I remember him trying to explain to me how it was supposed to work, and how that explanation went over my head. 

Hershel was a tech geek of sorts, so I guess his tech-speak didn’t land anywhere close to the comprehension center of my brain. It probably wasn’t his fault; it was just the feeble nature of my ability to absorb geek talk in an understanding way. 

In 2015, a year or so after I had left the clubs, I dropped Hershel an email when I saw a couple of athletes with the surname Saylor at Indianapolis Roncalli High School being mentioned a lot in the sports section of the local newspaper. I asked him if he was related to either of them by chance. 

After kindly mentioning how it was good to hear from me and that he and his wife, Deb, who also was a member of the IMUPC, have spoken of me “quite a few times since the camera club,” he confirmed that the two Saylor athletes I had been reading about were children of a nephew of his. 

He then told me that he’d been doing some work for WHMB TV (Channel 40 in Indianapolis) for the station’s Friday sports broadcast. 

I found his obituary online and enjoyed a wonderful pictorial tribute that his family had arranged to display on the page. It included a few photos of Hershel holding his 3D camera, two more of which I'll provide immediately below. All three photos are from the pictorial tribute, incidentally.

After viewing the tribute, I went into my photo archives to see if I had any photos of Hershel from our days together in the photo club, and it turns out, I did. I’ll present them below, although none of them shows him using his special camera. 

It occurred to me while composing this post that the club never devoted a meeting (at least none that I had attended) for Hershel to introduce and demonstrate his 3D camera operation. It certainly would have been worth considering doing so, given that the club welcomed all topics related to the craft for its meetings.

Above, Hershel and fellow IMUPC member Bill Riggs peruse some of the images our club was putting up for sale at the 2011 rendition of the annual Christmas Market hosted by the Joy of All Who Sorrow Church at 16th and Delaware streets in Indianapolis. The photo below was taken at another point that evening at the Market. 

Six days after that event, the IMUPC had its annual club Christmas get-together, which is when I took photo above. The same month as the above Christmas Market and our club Christmas get-together, club members had a night outing in Zionsville to shoot holiday decorations, and that's where I shot the first photo below.

On June 16, 2012, Hershel and wife Deb joined club members in relaxing and enjoying refreshments after a full day of shooting the second then-annual Hendricks County Park2Park running race in which teams of six took turns running splits of a 60+ mile course starting at a county park at one end of the county and finishing in a county park at the other end. Below, in another photo from the obituary page photo tribute, Hershel enjoys the camaraderie of a fellow club member, Fred (his surname escapes me now), during the Park2Park shoot.