Science | Alex Farris Photo Blog

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.

Yesterday, there was a partial solar eclipse visible to pretty much the entire United States. I really wanted to see it; I missed the nine previous times a partial eclipse was visible in Indianapolis in my lifetime, and I have to wait until 2017 for my next opportunity (but first chance I get, I'm booking a hotel room in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to see totality).

To watch this eclipse safely, I found a piece of welder's glass left over from the transit of Venus in 2012. I wanted to do better than take photos of a green sun, though, and Roberts had what I needed: a neutral density filter (the test of which captured the first of the four suns shown below). It makes everything about 10 stops darker, so it's not feasible for anything but taking photos of really bright objects. It was worth the money, both because this was my first eclipse and because I could use it in the future to take photos of sunspots. I'm a nerd.

I then found a spot along Eagle Creek Reservoir, called a friend over to see the show with me, waited until 5:32pm, and... watched clouds cover the Sun. They were patchy enough at first, so I shot until a solid wall of cloud completely blocked the view half an hour before sunset. I was a bit disappointed...

...but only a small bit. Every time I could fire a clear-ish shot, I looked at the back of my camera and saw something I had never seen in person before: Earth's nearest celestial neighbor casting a shadow onto me, blocking out at least a little bit of the light that Earthly life has depended on for five billion years. I said, "This is so cool!" at least five times in the hour I spent shooting.

Composite of four photos taken at 2:12pm, 5:56pm, 6:02pm, and 6:12pm. Captured with a Nikon D300, 80-200mm lens, and 77mm ND1000 filter.

Tomorrow, there's a partial solar eclipse over most of the U.S., so the next blog entry will be all about that magic. Today, though, I have to catch up a bit on my Star photo assignments. Here, you'll find photos of a 150-year-old house being moved half a mile north, a cabaret I covered last year, and one of the more unique shows I've ever seen, Optical Popsicle.

As a bonus, I woke up entirely too early on Oct. 8, then waited half an hour and took a photo of the total lunar eclipse. Together with tomorrow's solar eclipse, you might be seeing a pattern develop. You'd be right.

Cast members travel through a black hole during Optical Popsicle, an annual variety show by the collective Know No Stranger, at The Toby Theatre at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Saturday, Oct. 11, 2014.