Photo Potpourri: Indiana

Showing posts with label Indiana. Show all posts

Saturday, June 14, 2025

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.

Saturday, August 3, 2024

CHAPTER 2
City of Franklin, Ind.

I’ve been to Franklin, Ind., on multiple occasions, most of the time to visit a good friend, Garry Petersen, in the 1980s and ’90s before he and his wife moved to Greenwood, Ind., in the 2000s. I got the inspiration to do a shoot in Franklin’s downtown area — including the distinguished Johnson County Courthouse — from those visits.

In summer 2009, I drove to Franklin to make the pictures you see in this post. For reasons I’m not sure of today, I never did a blog post about that shoot even though I’d launched the blog about a half-year earlier.

So I present pictures from that shoot here today in the second of this blog’s latest “Chapter” series, Catching Up ... on pre-blog years. Leading off the post is an exterior shot of Beeson Hall, a cultural and recreation center at adjacent to the Franklin College campus. The hall also has space to serve as a rental banquet facility.

Above: a view of Jefferson Street, the city’s main east-west thoroughfare, looking west with the county courthouse clock tower in the background on the left.

Above and below: Sections of the businesses on E. Court Street across the street from the courthouse.

A detail shot of window on a downtown building (above), and a section of businesses (below) along the south side of Jefferson Street across from the courthouse.

Above and first four below: Detail shots of building facades of downtown businesses on Jefferson Street.

Above and first two photos below: Back to the courthouse square businesses and a bench on the courthouse square.

Above: Pretty simple: A motorcycle in front of a guitar shop. Below, another cycle, this time in front of the local public library.

Above: A detail shot of the limestone entrance to the library.

Above and last four photos below: I didn't want to wrap up this chapter without presenting a few images of the very distinguished Johnson County Courthouse in the heart of downtown Franklin. I made a special trip on Aug. 9, 2009, to take this photos. According to the courthouse square's entry in Wikipedia, the building features elements of Second Empire, Neo-Jacobean and Romanesque Revival style architecture. It has a low hipped metal roof topped by a central tower and with smaller corner towers topped with pyramidal roofs. It was designed by George W. Bunting, who also designed courthouses at Frankfort, Ind. (Clinton County) and Anderson, Ind. (Madison County). To view a full gallery of images of just the courthouse shoot, follow the link in this sentence.

Coming tomorrow: Chapter 3, 2004 Memorial Day weekend tornado

Previously in Catching Up ... on pre-blog years:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Seek the Riot metal band

Sunday, June 16, 2024

CHAPTER 30
Earlham College campus

The 800-acre campus of Earlham College on the southwest side of Richmond, Ind., has many red brick structures — some contemporary enough to reflect the interesting angles and shapes you find in modern architecture.

And Earlham has a core pedestrian green circular mall and quadrangle (the school refers to it as “the heart.”)

Earlham's 680 students, as well as its faculty and administrators, traverse the quadrangle, a tree-rich network of access options, to reach any of almost a dozen nearby academic or residence hall buildings.

One residence facility, Earlham Hall, pictured in the photo leading off the post, sits prominently at the south end of the mall. Its original structure, which opened in 1855, was rebuilt in 1957 after a devastating fire.

Earlham Hall looks large and stately enough to be an academic building, and as it turns out, the first floor is used for various student services, including health, counseling and security. Student housing is on the second through fourth floors. It connects to the Runyan Center for student activities and dining facilities.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. If you approach the school from the main entrance off the National Road (U.S. 40), you get a terrific, quiet transition drive through another green area with sporadic trees.

On the other hand, if you happen to approach the school from College Avenue along its eastern border, as I did, you first encounter the School of Religion and Bethel Theological Seminary, which are interestingly set off from the rest of the campus.

Earlham offers about 40 majors and 40 minors (and 12 applied minors) toward earning Bachelor of Arts degrees. It also offers Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.) and Master in Education (M. Ed) degrees and has an affiliated graduate seminary, the Earlham School of Religion, which offers three master’s degrees — divinity, ministry and religion.

Earlham boasts an endowment of $474,820,554 as of 2024, the second most for a small, private college or university in all of Indiana, behind only DePauw, according to College Raptor.

Unlike other campuses, parking is impressively plentiful and sprinkled throughout the campus, making it easy to get to places if you have to make multiple stops on the grounds.

The college’s predominant brick structures have beautiful exteriors, and the only one that struck me as in need of possible upgrading is Lilly Library. The library was built in 1953, and even though there was additional construction 40 years later, it struck me as lacking a place of prominence on campus. Most schools make their library a centerpiece structure (Butler University’s Irwin Library, Taylor University’s Zondervan Library and University of Indianapolis’ Krannert Memorial Library come to mind).

I wanted to inspect the inside of the Athletics and Wellness Center, which was open the Saturday I was there, but you needed a student ID card to get in. That was unfortunate, because it looked like a splendid facility to photograph.

Another frustration (I might even say oddity) was that the bookstore was closed — on a game day. (Perhaps because it was a holiday weekend?) There was a modest makeshift kiosk to buy Earlham spirit gear and clothing near the gate of the football stadium, but variety and choice options were limited there. There were a few T-shirt style options, but if you were looking for a hooded pullover sweatshirt, you had one choice.

Earlham’s Darrell Beane football stadium (which also is used for field hockey and soccer) is a relatively new facility (2007), and its FieldTurf surface is only four years old. My only nit about it was that there were no trees nearby to prove shade for cover on hot days. (For a detailed report on the status of football at Earlham College, please refer to the bottom portion of the text in Chapter 29 of this series.)

The only parts of campus I didn't make it to were the baseball, soccer and field hockey facilities and equestrian center on the far south end (referred to the as the “back campus”). I didn't spend nearly as much time exploring the Center for the Visual and Performing Arts as I had hoped and/or wanted.

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

Above: One of several interesting bay concrete rounds I saw on a residence hall.

Above and next two below: Residence halls and their facilitation of environmentally friendly mobile transportation.

Above and next several below are examples of the splendid landscaping you'll find on campus. Many of these were in the quadrangle (“the heart”) at the center of campus.

The scenes immediately above and below were from the green area at the north end of campus by the main entrance.

Above: This view to the west from in front of Stout Meeting House overlooks Earlham Cemetery, which is outside of campus.

Above: A view north toward the main entrance from the quadrangle.

Above and below: Spot plantings between Runyan Center and the Center for Visual and Performing Arts.

Above: The Center for Science and Technology.

Noyes (above) and Dennis (below) halls, with the Joseph Moore Natural Science Museum to the right of Dennis Hall.

A bloom (above) from a plant near Dennis Hall, and ornamental grass (below) along the west side of Landrum Bolling Center for Interdisciplinary and Social Studies.

Above: A monument in front of Stout Meetinghouse. In 1660, Mary Dyer, a Quaker, was punished by hanging in Boston for her belief in religious freedom.

Above and below: Front facades of the School of Religion and seminary.

Above: Virginia Cottage, near the religious studies section of the campus, houses the Newlin Center for Quaker Thought and Practice and the Office of Religious Life.

Above: A forgotten pair of sunglasses on a bench south of the quadrangle proved to be a fascinating find in reflective photography.

Above: Path to Runyan Student Activities Center.

Above and below: Two views of the Athletics & Wellness Center.

Above and next three below: I'm always looking for interesting benches in compositions.

Above: One side of Landrum Bolling Center for Interdisciplinary and Social Studies. The building was named for Landrum Ryder Bolling, a journalist, diplomat and activist for peace who served as the college’s president from 1958-73 and who died at the age of 104 on Jan. 17, 2018.

Above: Carpenter Hall.

Above: Lilly Library

The south facade (above) of the Center for Visual and Performing Arts and a portion of an exhibit (below) inside the facility.

Approaching (above) and arriving (below) at Darrell Beane Football Stadium. The John Loose Weight Room and home team lockers are behind the stadium entrance in the second photo below.