October 8, 2025
Contact: Janese Heavin, heavinj@missouri.edu
Photos by Abbie Lankitus, Gretta Cohoon, Sam Cox, Reagan Manis and Kolden Lam
In September, the University of Missouri celebrated a campaign kickoff, beating kansas, remaining undefeated in football and Homecoming — all before the leaves changed colors. University photographer Abbie Lankitus shares her favorite photos of a very busy month.
If you were able to watch Illuminate the Sky — a drone and pyrotechnics show to kick off Power the Roar, Mizzou’s $2 billion transformative fundraising campaign at the beginning of the month — you know it was quite the spectacle. Photos really don’t do it justice. However, this image that student photographer Sam Cox took of a young girl pointing to the grad cap encapsulates the event for me. Perhaps she sees a future version of herself here. The drone show featured the areas that Mizzou is going to focus on in during the Power the Roar campaign, and I hope many Missourians found themselves represented in those stories as this young girl might have.
Also an exciting kickoff to the month was having SEC Nation visit campus. I thought it fitting to include this photo because they’re coming back for the Alabama game this weekend.
But apart from that, student photographer Reagan Manis perfectly lined up these helmets with Jesse in the background. The studio lights are illuminating the helmets and letting all kU fans know they’re not in kansas anymore.
One of the most beautiful moments of the game against kU (besides beating them) was when Noah Gilion was honored at halftime. Gillion defeated osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer, with support from providers at MU Health Care. He received a standing ovation and many deserved cheers. The emotion he showed just solidified the moment, and I had to include this shot among my favorites of the month.
The kansas game was electric, no doubt about that. It was so fun to shoot on the sidelines with the energy constantly rising as the time on the clock decreased. One of those key moments was this touchdown by Jamal Roberts that Reagan captured from the end zone.
We both photographed many touchdowns that day, but this one spoke to me because you not only see three kU players failing to chase Roberts down, but a fourth is on the ground after missing a tackle. Put it in the Louvre!
Because I can’t resist rubbing it in a little more, Reagan got this wonderful shot of kU fans having a miserable time as their team loses. Not much more to say than please enjoy looking at each face.
The light, the victory, the moment — I LOVE this photo. The sun has slightly dipped behind the clouds, but it perfectly illuminates the drum like it was meant to be. All the many Mizzou football players’ hands lifting it up is inspirational. This is why some of the best stories are sports stories. The battle is laid plain, and there is a victor: Mizzou.
An upcoming story on Show Me Mizzou will feature nursing student Dylann Henley. I won’t spoil the story, but it’s really good. The portrait I took of Henley was in the courtyard area behind the Sinclair School of Nursing. I took an 85mm prime lens and shot from a lower position. While I was framing her, I noticed this flare that kept showing up in the bottom of the frame. Once I took the photo and looked at the preview, I noticed it was a full rainbow flare. Due to partial accident, partial preparedness (thank you, prime lenses!), I was able to get this stunning portrait worthy of Henley and her story.
Two weeks before Homecoming, the Tiger Food Fight food drive kicks off the festivities at the Reynolds Alumni Center. This year, they broke another record with 171,987 pounds of food and 127,939 physical cans collected. It’s a very impressive feat, and something that is captured well in this moment by Reagan. Two Homecoming royalty candidates and a volunteer high-fiving next to donated food encapsulates what the drive is about — helping others.
Some photos you can hear, and I can hear this loud and clear. Coupled with the American flag on the screens and fireworks above, it’s a loud moment that struck me with awe the first time I saw it. Doesn’t hurt that this opened the South Carolina game, which we won 29-20.
Speaking of celebratory moments, Truman the Tiger soaked the student section after we won the battle of the Columbias. I just love student photographer Kolden Lam’s shot capturing the moment of the water above Truman. As the water droplets fall, they also fall back in focus and create this beautiful spray of bokeh. The stadium lights are also illuminating the edges of Truman on his right. The lighting, movement and moment just came together so well here.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the term leading lines? This photo of a student at MizzouRec’s Venture Out takes that to a new level. Leading lines help the viewer’s eyes roam to and from the main subject. Not only does the odyssey high ropes course do that, but it also creates this wonderfully abstract pattern in the sky. Makes me want to venture out to the Venture Out course. I’ll see myself out.
The Wheelchair Basketball team regularly gets new individual and team portraits made for their upcoming seasons. It requires creativity and ingenuity to make the same space and subject come to life uniquely each time. University photographer Gretta Cohoon achieved this beautifully with a portrait of David Petit. Using a ghost filter and a couple of lights, this effect is unlike any other the team has had before. Support our players this upcoming season and get a poster with their new portraits while you’re at it!
For the beginning of Homecoming week, three nights of talent show graced the stage at the Missouri Theatre. Those performances allow for a number of interesting lighting situations and body compositions, thus creating a scenario for a photo like this one to be made. Reagan covered the talent show for the first time last year and went for all three nights as a member of Homecoming Steering Committee. After each performance, we reviewed and critiqued the images, and every time was better than the last. This year he only went one night, and thanks to the practice from the year before, had the practice to make this image.
One of my favorite Mizzou Homecoming traditions is Decorate the District because you can see the effects of it long after those participating go home. Gretta got this beautifully detailed reflection of a student painting. It’s just such a unique look at an event that happens every year with so many fun details.
Like the talent show, the NPHC Step Show allows for some very unique and cool views on stage as part of the performances. The way the smoke wafts around the student with the light reflecting off the sweat, while the rest of the photo is clean from distractions, elicits that perfect cool factor for this image to make my monthly favorites.
For a photographer, the Spirit Rally at Traditions Plaza is incredibly tough to shoot. Because it’s so dark, we have to turn up the sensitivity on our cameras (ISO for you camera nerds) just to make the subjects visible in the photos. This also introduces a lot of grain, or noise, into the camera. It’s fixable in post-processing, but not our favorite thing to do. It’s better if we can minimize as much grain as possible. Or we can slow everything down and accentuate the action and movement at the Spirit Rally by lowering our shutter speed and letting the light blur in-camera. That’s exactly what Sam did for this photo. Couple it with the LED batons the twirlers brought this year, and it creates such a fun photo that showcases the action in a more direct way than stopping the motion in a typical image.
I sometimes wonder if kids get more candy at the Homecoming Parade than Halloween. There’s so much thrown from the floats and parade participants to the many children lining the sidewalks with their buckets and bags ready to be filled. Sam got this perfectly timed moment of a parade spectator less than a second away from catching a piece of candy. Even better, there’s a catch in the child’s eye and a beautiful rim lighting from the sun. It just makes this perfect moment even better.
For Homecoming, my main job is capturing the royalty crowning. Once that’s done, I take my leave. Immediately after halftime and the crowning, Sam and I went to find the other student photographers, Reagan and Kolden, who were on the sideline. As we were coming up to them, Ahmad Hardy ran into the end zone and directly into the sideline where Reagan and Kolden were sitting. We caught up to them and Kolden exclaimed: “I got the perfect touchdown photos!” We all crowded around his camera as he cycled through what could be a reel of the last minute of football play. I’m not a sports photographer, but I enjoy sports photography. Moments and photos like Kolden’s make a whole game worth it.
I didn’t know this moment happened until Sunday night when we were all editing the Homecoming photos to be ready for the Show Me Mizzou gallery Monday morning. Joey Yancey had been crowned Homecoming king earlier in the evening and at the end of the game, came to conduct the band of which he’d previously been a member and section leader. It felt like a fitting tribute to the king instead of the moment he was crowned because Yancey was with his people. The Homecoming court can sometimes feel larger than life among the student body, but they really are just those who found their calling at Mizzou and made the most of it.
Inspired by Robert Sutton at the University of Alabama plus the new night lighting setup at Memorial Stadium, I set out this Homecoming game to create the MU out of the bokeh. Bokeh occurs when the focus is on the foreground and the background is blurred out, so any (typically small points of) light in the background just starts turning into large circles of light. The lights are circles though because the shape of a lens is a circle. By putting a cover over your lens with a cutout of the shape you want the bokeh to be, you can change those lights to be any shape you want.
Big shoutout to my husband, David, who spent Saturday morning on his Cricut, while I was photographing the parade, attempting to get the cutout of the MU shield logo. I think he did it perfectly and I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. Just another way to make Mizzou shine in this incredibly eventful September.
