A trip to the Shedd...

Come on Dad!!!

Hello!

Thomas is coming!!!

The boyfriend and I took Raevyn to the Shedd Aquarium this past Sunday; what a marvelous day! All I can say is that I wish that I had the imagination I had when I was 3. When we arrived at the train station, Rae was a little terrified and very excited. The incoming cargo trains, she informed me, were The Polar Express and the train we were about to board was Thomas! What a fun thing to pretend! She sat on her daddy's lap on "Thomas", smiling away and eating strawberries and telling us stories about "Thomas".

We saw the "fishies." That was not nearly as important to her as riding on "Thomas," though. But the stingrays and seadragons were pretty fantastic, she seemed to think. I'm a sucker for seahorses and seadragons. There was no oceanarium... that made me a bit sad. Rae and I both LOVE dolphins. Instead, they have some sort of dog show that we did not attend. We also went to Eleven... the city diner that has freakin 13 dollar burgers... yeah that was annoying! :D
Anyway we had a ton of fun and just wanted to share!

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 My boyfriend is likely to come home one day and find the furniture has been replaced by a giant box to take pictures in...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?

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. :)

Hello!

Hey, I'm Michelle! This is the first post and I just wanted to introduce myself. I'm a freelance photographer in Northwest, Indiana (Valparaiso to be exact), but I try to think of myself as more of an artist than anything. I have been toying with the idea of creating a blog for quite some time now... so here it is in black and white! I look forward to writing some new posts and hearing everyone's thoughts and ideas!

~Michelle~
http://michellemcnerlinphotography.com