Sports | Alex Farris Photo Blog

Yes, yes, yes, I'm posting January photos in March. Life (e.g. two medical school interviews, work in Seymour), got in the way of posting, but not in the way of taking pictures. I was assigned three events for the Star: A high school wrestling meet featuring the indomitable Carmel High School girls' swim team, a sandwich cook-off during a Colts playoff game, and a little thing they like to call Bacon Fest. Also, my college housemate Steph, featured here, got engaged to her British boyfriend, so I made the trek to Chicago for the party. It almost goes without saying, but I will be taking her wedding photos.

Next post will be up within the hour!

Ally Benedyk of Love Handle doles out a sandwich containing Ovaltine brioche, hickory bacon, blackberry-miso jam and koshered carrots, during the Taste of the NFL Sandwich Cook-off at Recess on North College Avenue, Sunday, Jan. 4, 2015.

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.

This past weekend's assignments both involved a lot of walking around downtown. The first was Saturday's Walk for Water, an event I covered last year. I wasn't worried about taking a test later the same day, so I was able to be mentally present at the event a lot more completely than I was last summer. So, I tried something outside the box and rented a paddleboat to cover the water-retrieval part. I didn't get the photo I envisioned (the water fetchers didn't throw the buckets out into the canal, so there wasn't a chance to get a photo of one of the buckets hurtling toward the camera just above the water), but it did force me to think differently, which is always good in a photo assignment. The photos went here on the IndyStar website, and two of them got into the paper.

The second assignment, early on Sunday morning, was a triathlon that started in the canal. The Tri-Indy Triathlon snaked up to the Northwestside, but it was centered in White River State Park, where all three segments converged. I found a parking spot in time to cover the start of the sprint-distance race, and really, what part of the race would be better than people jumping into and swimming in the canal? These photos also went up to the IndyStar website, but there was a very unfortunate crop done on photo 4 in that gallery (probably by the website's CMS), so ignore that version of it. Photo 7 here is the full version; it has the all-important walking-on-water aspect that the cropped version lacks.

Sabra Logan, founder and director of Iibada Dance Company, leads walkers in an African welcoming dance during the third annual Walk for Water event downtown, Saturday, Aug. 2, 2014. The event raised money for a community clean-water well in Kager, Kenya. Attendees walked from American Legion Mall to the canal, filled buckets with water and walked back to the mall, simulating the path villagers without clean water have to take every day.