Music | Alex Farris Photo Blog

In a flashback to an entry from four years ago, I took photos of an insect. This time, it was a bee, and because bees buzz, I was only able to get one relatively okay photo that wasn't too motion-blurry. So, there's that.

Tonight (just like the previous entry, this one is really posted on May 5, but I can change dates because I built this website and can control things like that), I'm covering the Republican primary for mayor of Carmel for the Star. It's my first assignment for the paper since March, and it's rather exciting.

More referred business! Andrew Lyon (right) conducted the Columbus (Ind.) Symphony Orchestra on April 26, and the night before, he called me saying his original photographer was unable to cover his concert. I obliged, and thus covered my first orchestra concert since my IDS days.

Before going to Guatemala for the second time in the last week of February (photos by former IU journalism dean Jim Brown on the trip website), the Star sent me on four photo assignments. The first two, on the first Saturday of the month, could not be more different: a regional high school wrestling tournament in the early afternoon, and, stretching into the wee hours of Sunday morning, Nelly's concert at The Vogue. The latter photos, for some reason, never made it to the website, but they most certainly happened.

The following weekend, I covered a child's birthday party put on by a kids' spa treatment company. I never before had taken a photo of seven-year-olds with cucumbers and masks on their faces, so cross that off the bucket list. And the day after Guatemala, I was thrown back into the mix of American culture with the most Hoosier thing imaginable: a high school basketball game played in an overflowing gym. Southport played Evansville Reitz, previously undefeated, and pulled away in the final minute for an 88-80 victory. These are probably my best basketball photos since my time at the IDS, not least because of the enthusiasm of the players and fans (but also because I wasn't afraid to use 3200 ISO).

Also, photos I took in December were finally published. Local DJ Oreo Jones has a cooking show with all the trappings of a public access show a la "Wayne's World." It's called Let's Do Lunch, and it features local chefs and music acts. I covered the filming of an episode the night before my biochemistry final (don't worry, I got an A in the class), and the photos and story finally ran online on Feb. 4, and seven color photos made it into the next day's local section (four on the front!).

There. Now I'm all caught up.

Rosie Lockwood relaxes under a face mask and cucumbers during her friend Kate Hollingsworth's birthday party and spa treatment provided by Pretty and Posh Parties in Fishers, Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015.

There are 10 days left in the year, so now is the perfect time to remember that I am behind on my posts. I picked a good time to accidentally stop posting; I could focus on a new job with ScribeAmerica and on my biochemistry class, and that photo illustration of the partial solar eclipse is quite pretty, isn't it? Alas, it is time to knock it down the list of most recent posts and upload some new photos.

This first batch of catch-up is just that: the first. I also neglected to post photos from two weddings, one in the summer and one in the fall. Those deserve their own entries, and they'll go up before the year-end recap.

Unlike what I've done with most previous entries, I'll select only one photo from each assignment. It's an exercise I've grown away from, given the focus of my Star assignments on filling pageview-greedy photo galleries, but choosing only one photo from these assignments is refreshing. I hope you like it.

One more thing: Last week, Michel du Cille died at the age of 58 while covering the Ebola outbreak in Liberia. He was a three-time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who worked for the Miami Herald and The Washington Post, but before all of that, he was a photographer for the Indiana Daily Student and a graduate of Indiana University. I had the fortune of being in the same room as him on three separate occasions: a lecture and after-lecture photos during centennial celebrations of the IU School of Journalism; a lecture with two other Pulitzer-winning IU alumni; and possibly my most helpful (and most humbling) photo critique. I'll never forget how good he was at seeing the ordinariness in photos I, the day after taking them, thought made up a great set of breaking-news work, and his ability to pick out a set of photos that most effectively told a story. It's palpable in both his images and his words from Liberia.

You were a good guy, Michel. I hope people remember your work for years and years.

Adil Majid (far right), a member of the Muslim Student Association at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, leads a prayer of supplication for slain aid worker Abdul-Rahman (Peter) Kassig during a memorial service for Kassig at the Indiana Interchurch Center in Indianapolis, Saturday, Nov. 22, 2014.