May 2011 | Alex Farris Photo Blog

I was working on the final draft and multimedia element of my Hawaii story in the Herman B Wells Library on Wednesday evening. I knew storms were a'brewin', so I brought my camera with me.

Sure enough, at about 10:15 p.m. the auditor at the library, Matt Duff, tells everybody that they should go down to the basement. Five minutes later, the lobby doors shook and wind beat against the westside windows. There were frantic saves of projects, ejections of hard drives, some stalling and a stupid question with a blunt response, but we eventually left the window-filled Information Commons and headed to the basement.

For the next four hours, I felt journalism in me. I interviewed people in the basement, I heard where damage had been reported and I went to take photos of that damage. Fortunately, after I walked a ways down Seventh Street, a car pulled up and were willing to drive me home. After that, I drove my own car to other damage sites and got home at about 2:15 a.m., thanking the cleaning crews wherever I went. The result appears below.

(My former IDS colleague, Peter Stevenson, had a wholly different, and scarier, experience with the evening's storm. Check it out.)

A tree lays across Hunter Avenue near Fess Street. Because the tree did not break through the home or any power lines, the city workers decided to wait until morning to move it so they could take care of other damage.

As has been pointed out by my father, my last blog entry is already out-of-date. For the sake of keeping people informed, here is a link to the developing Facebook album of photos of our reporting trip to Hawaii. There are further updates from the class on the J460 blog page. Enjoy!

The USS Arizona memorial stands over the remains of the battleship and its men, all lost in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. (Alex Farris)

As I make this entry, I'm on a Delta Airlines flight to Hawaii. I'll be reporting with J360 International Reporting as replacement for our cancelled trip to Japan. Before I start putting photos from Honolulu on the blog, I thought I would post something about what I've done between Victor Oladipo's performance and graduation this Saturday. Here's a mini-tour.

(click on full entry for image slider, i.e. all the interactivity.)

Every Tuesday at 11 a.m. (or sometimes Wednesday at 10:30, if it rained on Tuesday), I went to the roof of the West Tower of the Wells Library to take a photo at the same spot on the wall. I was hoping to make a time lapse of photos as the Indiana University Arboretum transitioned from winter to spring to near-summer, but as previously mentioned, I lost a lot of those photos. Fortunately, I didn't lose the wintry ones, so I combined the first photo with the last one, taken May 4, and made a JavaScript slider out of it. Enjoy the interactivity. (Alex Farris | Indiana Daily Student)