Alex Farris Photo Blog

This is the post I originally promised two years ago.

In the lead-up to medical school, and in between shifts as an emergency room scribe, I did a few more photo assignments for The Indianapolis Star. One of those assignments, the Carmel mayoral election, made the front page of the paper the next day, and although I was changing careers, I was still excited about it.

During medical school, I managed to cover three weddings. Two of those were booked before I started school and occurred during the first semester, so I had to find a way to fit them in between anatomy exams. (Definitely worth it; both weddings were special and intimate ceremonies joining two good people together.) The third wedding just could not be passed up, even though by then (third semester) I was well aware of how much of a time commitment medical school is. My friend Steph, featured twice on this blog, had a beautiful wedding in Florida in the fall of 2016 before moving to England with her husband the following winter. If her wedding (which begins here with photo 17) is the last one I cover as a photographer, I'll be quite happy to end that career with such a great couple.

Scecina pitcher Julia Blastic (center) and other teammates celebrate as Lea Thompson (right) runs home after Justice Carmichael's grand-slam home run during Scecina's 7-4 victory over Cathedral in the high school city softball title game at Brookside Park, Saturday, May 9, 2015.

Hello world!

It's been two years since I've updated the website. As I mentioned in the last post, I started medical school in August 2015. Since that time, my life has been dominated (by choice, mostly) by the Krebs cycle, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, standardized patients, computed tomography images, treatment algorithms, and, in the past four months, real patients in need of real care. It's been quite an adventure, and although I sometimes pine for the relatively simpler days of taking and submitting pictures, I don't regret exchanging one thrilling career for another.

This month, I'm taking an advocacy elective, and its seminar format affords a lot more free time than my first two clerkships of surgery and psychiatry. So, I finally have time to post an update to this six-year-old blog. It's not the post that I promised two years ago ("a catch-up catch-all entry ... before school completely dominates my life"); that post will come next. First, I want to post some pictures from the thing that completely dominated my life (mostly; I had some free time). Most of these pictures are of concepts I drew for study purposes, but there is a bonus collection of images from the solar eclipse this year. Explanations for each concept appear in the captions.

Welcome back!

The metabolism of hemoglobin (and then some). This is a long and winding road involving vitamin B12, an iron-binding protein called ferritin, and chromosomes 11 and 16. I combined multiple individual pathways that wouldn't seem to go together, such as the metabolism of methylmalonic acid and the fate of bilirubin. It seems I was in a synthetic mood on January 22.

Medical school classes start this week, so before all that madness, I took a smaller, but still adventurous and slightly myopic, trip. On July 17, I set out for Chicago on a road trip through Omaha and Casper, Wyoming, to take a hike in Shoshone National Forest.

This is as high as I hiked. The view felt so surreal (and I was so tired from the walk up to it) that this was a good place for a break.

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