Spanish | Alex Farris Photo Blog

I've never been to a KISS concert, and neither had another photographer shooting last night at Klipsch Music Center. He had started out following John Mellencamp, got into photographing Farm Aid in 2009, and has since covered so many acts, but not KISS. We had also heard that KISS was quite friendly to photographers, doing their thing so close to us in the pit and, of course, providing pyrotechnics and painted faces. He was excited, jumping up and down a bit before the show started, and he made me excited, too.

After our two songs were up, on our walk back to the holding room, we were kids in a candy store. We were looking through our photos, gaping and hollering and yelling, "I got it!" and throwing awesomes every which way. It was so much fun.

And that was before KISS and Def Leppard did the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

This is the sort of assignment that gets you excited about the whole idea of photography. This is like a hole-in-one in golf; you don't get many assignments like this, but you do your best to get them, and the promise of one in the future keeps you going.

In other news: I took the MCAT on Thursday. I can now return from the life of a studious hermit to a relatively normal existence.

(There are no photos of Def Leppard, even though what I heard of their pre-KISS concert was face-melting, because they didn't approve any photographers. They were out for the challenge, though, so there's that.)

Members of KISS (Gene Simmons, Eric Singer, Paul Stanley and Tommy Thayer) are drenched in ice water after accepting the ALS ice bucket challenge from Motley Crue at Klipsch Music Center, Friday, Aug. 22, 2014. KISS and Def Leppard each pledged $10,000 to the ALS Association and challenged music acts such as Elton John, U2 and Prince.

On Friday afternoon, I heard the doorbell ring, and I knew the rest of the weekend from that point on would be awesome. At the door were Amanda and Jake, two friends from IU with whom I studied in Madrid for six months in 2010. They picked me up, I guided them through the winding forested roads of the northwest corner of Indianapolis, and we drove up I-65 and a hellishly crowded Dan Ryan Expressway to a hostel in Chicago for a long-overdue Spain reunion.

Artur throws a Frisbee on the shores of Lake Michigan in front of the Chicago skyline.

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The camera already provides a rigid frame, and often it's a pretty constraining one. Human sight is so panoramic, and so narrowing that range to a 3:2 box already takes some of the majesty and breadth out of a landscape or a piece of action. Why, you might ask, would you limit a photo even further? Three reasons: More story, more depth, and more focus.

The Plaza de España in Seville, Spain (regrettably dredged for renovations for this photo on Mar. 27, 2010) was a filming site for the Naboo sequences in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, as well as a site for Lawrence of Arabia.