Roy G. Holland Park is circular, spacious ... and key resource in Fishers, Ind.

In the mid- to late 1980s, my early years living in Indianapolis, a teammate on a company softball league we played for would often invite my family over to his home after games to dine and relax while the kids amused themselves on the swings and other playground-type equipment.

George, the work colleague and teammate, lived in the town of Fishers on the northeast side of Indianapolis. Their home was in one of the town's earliest major developments. One summer in the 1980s, he and his wife invited my family to Fishers to enjoy the town's annual Freedom Festival and parade held in celebration of the Fourth of July.

Remember, this goes back almost 30 years, a time when Fishers was just beginning to blossom into a community. It was nowhere near the size and development it is today. One thing has stayed constant through the years, though: The Freedom Festival -- an amalgam of food and beverage vendors, games for all ages and music -- was then and is still anchored at Roy G. Holland Park, an amenity in the heart of Sunblest residential development.

Details of that day 30 years ago are vague today, but I do remember being struck by the circular configuration of the park. I could be wrong about this, but I don't remember the park being very developed at that time. Certainly not to the degree it is today.

This year, I made several trips to the park, the first time I've had an occasion to explore it closely. Lee Ann's daughter, Mindy, and Mindy's family live in that same development. I was there for the Freedom Festival in the summer (which I wrote about in a separate blog post), and I was there again last month while taking walks for exercise through the neighborhood during a return visit to Indiana.

While on my walks, I made a point to periodically stop and pull out my iPhone to make photographs of the park, thinking the images might make a good subject for a future post here. So that's what this is about. The photos were taken on separate visits, Oct. 18-19, of this year. A full gallery can be found at my site at Smugmug.com.

I was particularly struck by how this park has plenty of space for soccer and baseball fields, a couple of basketball courts and even two sand volleyball courts. You can see the latter through the trees -- some of whose leaves were starting to turn colors -- in the photo leading off the post. I didn't devote any photos this time to the playground area because I think I covered that pretty well in my post this summer from the Freedom Festival.

For those of you looking for a pleasant course to tackle some day, Holland Park's paved path along the circumference is just about a mile long.

Roy G. Holland Park has ample space to accommodate soccer (above), pickup basketball (below), baseball (second below) and sand volleyball (third below). If you pull up a larger version of the photo of the volleyball courts, you can see an adult seated in the shade on the far left ... and two small children romping through the sand just right of center at the far end of the courts.

Above and below: A small section of the park's north end is heavily wooded, and strikingly so in a back-lighting situation, which is what I came upon on both visits. I paused a while to appreciate how it was in this area -- where there was good shade and cover from the hot sun -- where the vast majority of Freedom Festival food, beverage and arts and craft vendors set up just a few months earlier. 

A paved path (above) that is part of the circumference trail, and another (below) that winds through the park's interior. 

Above: Another autumn colors photo.

Above: A drainage pipe I found of interest.

Above: Walking back in the neighborhood after leaving the par, I came across this low-hanging branch on a tree whose leaves were changing colors ... and highlighted in dappled sunlight.  

A short trip to the Downtown canal

A chance trip to Downtown Indianapolis on a rare midweek day off Thursday -- and a whim to bring along my pocket camera when I left the house to head downtown -- resulted in these photographs of various points along the Indianapolis canal.

The several miles of canal on the west side of Downtown is a much-visited and much-photographed landmark in Indianapolis. I've seen images of the canal from so many angles, at night, dawn and dusk, and quite a few images enhanced in post-processing by photographers using Photoshop editing software to produce fine art visuals of the various scenes there.

So I post these images with a significant degree of humility, as these are only slightly tweaked in post-processing and captured in jpeg format (not the usual RAW I take on my digital SLR) on my Pentax Optio Z10 compact camera.

Even though I've been to the Downtown canal before, it had been quite a while since my last visit. Certainly since before I bought my first digital SLR camera, which was in 2004. My visit Thursday helped me better understand the canal's attraction to visitors and sightseers, photographers, noon-hour workers seeking to get away from the hustle and bustle of the office, and joggers, walkers and other recreationalists.

(Above) A look down on one of the fountains, from an elevated overlook.

In the section of the canal that I walked, I came across several fountains that were set back from the pedestrian paths, and I was struck by their size, volume of streams and the streams' ferocity. I took pictures of that, which you see here. I also wanted to get some images of people within the canal landscape. Finally, I noticed an interesting "peek" of the top of the OneAmerica insurance building from one spot along the canal path.

I plan to return to the canal soon -- with my DSLR gear -- to spend more time, seek out more creative images and report back here with my results.

(Above) I snapped this image within 15 seconds after the one of the jogger at the very top of this post. For some reason, this fountain was drawing a lot of attention -- from those with and without cameras!

(Above) A visitor resting on a bench along the east side of the canal path.

(Above) An interesting ivy-adorned building along the west side of the canal path.


(Above) My compact did a nice job capturing the ferocity of the fountain stream.

(Above) An ivy-covered pedestrian bridge over the canal. The light-colored structure in the background is the OneAmerica building.


(Above) Two people sharing a quad-wheeled non-motorized vehicle for two.

(Above) Another angle of the ferocious fountain spray.

(Above) A pedestrian, just as he slides behind some tree foliage.

(Above) The "peek" at the top of the OneAmerica building, which was known for the longest time as the American United Life (AUL).