Today I come to you with what will hopefully be one of three posts this week. After my previous failure at the military junkyard/museum, I hoped that my luck would turn around today.
Thankfully my luck decided to not only turn around, but do three or four more rotations in a positive direction. Follow me here; an overgrown, reused, weather-beaten, abandoned minor-league baseball stadium. Oh photography gods, how I thank thee.
Bush Stadium is the previous home of the Indianapolis Indians, the local minor league squad. After a bit of digging, I found out that the stadium had been built in 1931 as Perry Stadium, then renamed Victory Field in 1942, and renamed for its remaining days as Bush Stadium. With a rich history including multiple movies being filmed on-site, Negro League baseball finals, and even being a host stadium for the 1987 Pan-Am games, the future of the stadium is now looking quite bleak. The stadium saw its final hurrah in 1997 as a midget auto racing venue.
Thirteen years later, the stadium sits in shambles, being used as a lot to hold cars from the "Cash for Clunkers" program. Very sad story for quite a history-rich building. With that being said, here is what was seen through my lens.
140 horsepower. 47 years old. Not much bigger than your car. Sounds like the perfect specifications for a plane, right? Right.
I consider myself to be quite an experienced flier, having taken somewhere around 100 flights in my lifetime, but this, this was a bit different. Thanks to Doyle McIntosh, I felt the most uncomfortable I have felt in the air in a very, very long time. For some odd reason I figured that a plane with 4 seats would handle nearly the same way as a 757. Incorrect.
Ok, enough whining and griping. After the whole experience I can say that it was an absolute blast, it really wasn't that dangerous nor scary, and I actually flew the damn thing for a solid 2-3 minutes. As for the pictures, I jumped back-and-forth across the line that is artistic photography and journalistic photography. The aerial images are of Ball State campus. Enjoi after the jump.
