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The second missed wedding entry (for my third wedding of 2014) began as a shameless plug.

During the first week of my summer organic chemistry lab at IUPUI, I overheard a comment from a TA named Callie. She wasn't my TA, but the two lab sections were combined in the computer lab that day, so I heard her say she was about to buy her wedding dress. I rolled my chair over and, slightly brazenly, asked when she was getting married and if she had a photographer. She said no, she didn't have a photographer. I pulled a business card out of my pocket and handed it to her, admitting to the shameless plug but offering to help.

Wouldn't you know it, the self-promotion worked. Her fiance sent me an email, and we scheduled an engagement photo session for downtown on a summer Sunday (the same Sunday as the Fray concert I was covering). After a productive session came the lakeside wedding in October, and holy hell was that fun.

"I'll have two more entries up later this week."
-Alex Farris, July 21, 2014

I'm rather silly, thinking I would post two more wedding-related blog entries as my organic chemistry class was finishing and my MCAT studying was about to start. Just before the end of this year, let's correct that myopia.

The first missed entry was the Kaiser/Rhoderick wedding. Kayleigh Kaiser is the oldest sister of a good friend from middle school and high school, and as he is stationed in Puerto Rico, seeing him was a great bonus on top of the good times, money, and photos. The ceremony was held at the gorgeous Holy Rosary Catholic Church just south of downtown Indy, and the reception was... decidedly not downtown, at a reception hall in Plainfield. I eventually drove from my home to the groom's Plainfield home, to Holy Rosary, to a downtown Arby's to wait out the rain, to a park in Plainfield, to the reception hall, to my home. Lots of driving, but no matter: I enjoyed the day. And finally, the photos get their time in the blog spotlight (they were already posted to the shop.

Next up: the wedding of a TA from this summer's organic chemistry class.

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.