Thus far, I only have one applicant in the contest! For those of you who didn't see it on my site and are getting married, I am running a contest to give away my services for a full day wedding shoot for one lucky couple! :D See my site for the rest of the details or give me a call today! This is only going through the end of February and if I don't get any more entries they will win by default but there are prizes for the top THREE couples chosen!!!

Revisiting my Foundations...

I just felt like sharing some of my early photography. Some of it is from when I was in school, some of it after. One is of one of my first client shoots. But all of this work inspires me to keep learning and continue to master my craft each day. I may have more posts like this in the future... it's been quite theraputic to revisit these images. :) I hope you enjoyed this little journey in photographs.
~Michelle~

New Gear and Latest adVentures...

I had to sell my Nikon... it was a sad day, very sad indeed, but I still have my Canons. My eyes, however, have been opened to CHEAP toy cameras, like the Lomo Oktomat 35mm rediculousness and the Holga 120 cameras and of course my Nimslo 3D camera and all of the liberation from the norm they offer. I don't need to change my aperture and shutter speed for creative freedom, although, manual focus is awfully nice. I need cameras that offer a legitimate view of what I see in my head when I look at things, without a ton of Photoshop...

Those of you who know me well, I am obsessed with very primitive forms of photography and often shoot with vintage and antique cameras. I am also in love with the concept of alternative processing and home made negatives, using the sun to contact print along with various other ideas myself and others have come up with. So it should be no surprise that I've also been designing some cameras of my own... a large format with a skewed film plane is in the works and hopefully will be built this summer, a long with a few small cameras... one round one and if i can pull it off a sub minature. We shall see.

And then MOST IMPORTANTLY comes my photo booth obsession. I want to build one... In my living room. I want to use the Oktomat in it. My boyfriend is likely to come home one day and find the furniture has been replaced by a giant box to take pictures in... He does not see my vision here, but wouldn't it be grand?

Model Search... TFP

So, I've been wanting to do some Pin Up/ Boudior photography for quite some time. Something modern, alternative, perhaps, but still with that classic cheesecake style... Let me know if you are interested in modeling for me. This is strictly on a time for prints basis.
email me... visit my website...
http://michellemcnerlinphotography.com

Photographing Snowflakes: from popphoto.com

A dedicated photographer makes snowflakes hot - and shows you how.

By Lori Fredrickson

	© Julie Falk

"No two snowflakes are alike." It's a phrase repeated so often that most of us accept it as fact. But, as Julie Falk points out, it's not a scientific idea at all -- it was simply a theory posited in 1898 by Wilson Bentley, the very first snowflake photographer, who captured close to 5,000 crystals in his lifetime.

"The idea has always fascinated me," the 49-year-old schoolteacher, from Clinton, MI, explains. "So I decided to look for two that were alike."

Unlike Bentley, who put snowflakes on slides and attached a bellows camera to a compound microscope, she uses a Nikon Coolpix 4200 point-and-shoot -- a choice that may seem surprising, given that Falk is no novice photographer. She spent 10 years shooting professionally for a local newspaper. But she's found the Coolpix 4200 convenient. "It seems to always know what you want to focus on," she says.

Where Bentley posed his flakes on a black background, Falk shoots them as she sees them -- "whether on wood, or stone, or on my shoelace. If they're on other snow, there's a way I can tilt my camera to catch the sunlight on that different flake."

For the record, Falk hasn't found two that are alike...yet.

Shooting snowflakes is easy -- just follow these tips:

• Get in as close as the camera will let you -- usually about 2 inches. Hold the camera steady, and shoot from as many angles as possible.

• Aim for snowflakes that are on surfaces with clean lines and that are positioned at an angle so early morning or late afternoon sunlight can bring out details. And, Falk adds, "It also helps to find flakes in the 'twilight zone' areas of the snow -- not in full sun nor quite full shadow -- so the background of the sunlit flake is the cobalt blue shadow that snow has on sunny days."

• Large, soft flakes photograph better than small, bright ones. Falk has found them at diameters up to 5mm. "You need to have a lot of moisture in the air," she says, "and it needs to be bitter cold."

• Nearly windless days are ideal for snowflake hunting, to up the likelihood of finding crystals intact. Colder temperatures help "to keep their little arms from melting off before you can get to them."

An interesting weekend for me, indeed...

I FINALLY got to see Wicked... And the whole situation was mildly traumatic, and so my story begins...
After insisting, rather dramatically I might add, all day on Saturday that I did not wish to attend the 2:00 show the following day, my adorable boyfriend finally convinced me that I should go. So, I grudgingly got out of bed the next morning (at 11:00) for him to whisk me off to the Windy City in his golden chariot (a genuine, hunk of junk, Ford Taurus). On the Skyway, of all places, we begin to notice an ominous cloud of steam arising from under the hood. Yes, that's right, the stupid car was over heating! All I could do do keep from having a heart attack was half-hazardly take pictures of the breathtakingly foggy Chicago skyline. After nearly hitting another car, cutting across multiple lanes of traffic to get to our exit and missing a turn we arrived, with 2 minutes to escape the "self park," walk around the block, get our tickets scanned, and find our seats (up 3 flights of stairs in the balcony). All was well. We didn't miss much.
Now, as far as the play went, we enjoyed it. It was very silly and sadly nothing like the book, but still a magical experience (some of which is due to the magnificent ceiling of the Oriental Theater, which I found myself staring at regularly). We, also, thouroughly enjoyed the fine dining at McDonald's on our way back to the "self park." After being undercharged for parking by the machine "cahier" at the "self park," we were lead to believe that luck was on our side... hardly the case. We refilled the resevior with anti-freeze and were on our way, only to discover 10 minutes down the road that it was leaking... all of it! We wound up sitting in our freezing cold heap of junk (the boyfriend, of course, was soaking wet after I dropped my coke on him) and chatting with the crazy pan handler, to whom we gave 2 whole dollars to, for over an hour when his parents sweetly decided to shorten their dinner plans to come retreive us (and have our hunk of junk towed). We arrived home just in time (10 o'clock that is) for our adorable daughter to fall asleep immediately. To the untrained eye, it may appear as though I am complaining, however, it was an amazingly wacky, mildly traumatic, fun date with my amazing boyfriend. :)