Personal | Alex Farris Photo Blog

I can't express how good the judges for this weekend's Indiana News Photographers Association contests were. You can find out a lot on the Internet about RJ Sangosti, Barbara Perenic, and Carlos Javier Ortiz, and I encourage you to do so. You'll be inspired, and your faith in the power of photojournalism will be strengthened.

Thanks to their comments, and to the awe-inspiring quality of work submitted by dear friends and other college students, I have here a much better compendium of my year's work than what I had submitted for my College Photographer of the Year (CPOY) entry. I can't enter it, of course, because the contest is over, but I also can't improve if I don't take a critical look at my work and continually edit it. The set of images I should have submitted (whether in a portfolio or sprinkled among the singles categories of feature, sports, and news) is at the bottom of the entry.

Before I get to that, though, I have a few other things to say.

This is the only photo for which I won an award, an honorable mention in features. There were photos I only entered in portfolio that should have gone in singles categories, and that might have won me an award place. Maybe. But, as you'll see in the entry, how things went was fine by me. // Joshua Wilson, 3, stands in the way of dancing children marching down a path during a Greenwood Summer Concert Series event on Saturday, July 20, 2013, at the Greenwood Amphitheater in Greenwood, Ind.

How do I define a year with so many distinct parts? This year contained one week of Spanish translating work in Guatemala with Operation Walk, six weeks of daily photojournaism at the Journal & Courier in Lafayette, eight weeks of learning how to do school again in that wonderful place called Bloomington, two weeks of frantically mapping out and registering for the start a wholly new career, a semester full of science classes at IUPUI, and the filling of every spare weekend possible with assignments from The Indianapolis Star. Not to mention hours of website coding, a weekend of best-manning a friend's wedding, one late night spent at a bar in Lafayette talking with a Purdue professor about the merits of getting a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology, two days of agonizing waiting before I found out I got straight A's, and five seconds of my brain processing the translation of a patient in Guatemala telling me she would name her next son after me.

Purdue senior Aaron Knott whispers to senior Kayla McCurdy before the Nearly Naked Mile on Thursday, March 21, 2013, on the Purdue campus. The event, run by Purdue Alumni Student Experience, supported Lafayette Transitional Housing.

Leica Microsystems, the brand behind the first practical 35mm camera, makes microscopes that take pictures. I had to try one out, and a post-doc in Dr. James Marrs' lab happily indulged me.

These are 3-day-old zebrafish embryos. Aren't they cute with their huge eyes? And they haven't made any pigment yet, so their skin is still clear! You can see all their innards underneath!