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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.

A study break amidst four tests this week means I have just enough time to update the blog for the first time in almost a month. Six assignments are smashed into one here, and given the work load required for animal biology, organic chemistry, physics, and general chemistry lab so far, expect these amalgams to be the norm, at least until I finish my pre-med coursework.

I'm not sure when (if?) the Ball State student performance at the Columbia Club Cabaret will be posted online, but the other five assignments have accompanying galleries: the City Moto auction benefiting an animal clinic, Carmel High School's 55-54 victory over Hamilton Southeastern in boys' basketball, the Love Sux anti-Valentine's Day event at Howl at the Moon, and Trey Anastasio Band's performance at the Egyptian Room. I've gotten lots of work this month, and now I finally have time to share it. Enjoy!

Garrison Brown, 2, and Jinai Lewis listen to a reading of the short story "Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters" during the annual Sankofa Black Heritage Festival at the Indiana State Museum, Saturday, Feb. 8, 2014. Sankofa, meaning "reach back and fetch it," is a celebration of West African culture.

While most other sane people were staying inside and out of the new snow that came down Saturday evening, I drove downtown to get photos of Megan Hilty. Hilty, who was big on NBC's Smash and played Glinda in the early runs of Wicked, was someone I had never heard of, like most of my recent music photo assignments. I also had never heard Rosemary Clooney's "When October Goes". Hilty sang that song, though, and I thought, "Damn, that was good."

As a symptom of not knowing who Megan Hilty was, I went into the assignment thinking it would be the sort of concert where I could quite easily get pictures of people enjoying the show. This was at The Cabaret at the Columbia Club, though, a place far removed from Radio Radio. This is a ritzy, highfalutin place, and people weren't going to get up from their dinner tables to dance. So, in order to fill out an IndyStar photo gallery, I had to rely on just the performer doing the things performers do. She was definitely evocative, so my job wasn't too hard.

Megan Hilty, a star of the TV show "Smash" and a prominent player of Glinda in "Wicked," performs with pianist Matt Cusson at The Cabaret at the Columbia Club downtown, Saturday, Jan. 18, 2014. Hilty performed Broadway covers and selections from her new album, "It Happens All the Time."