Category Archives: Press

I am excited to announce that a wedding I photographed is featured on the Floridian Weddings Blog!!!! This was such a beautiful wedding and Haley and Chris were such a great couple to work with. If you follow my work you know how much I love Coconut Palm Inn but this was the first opportunity I have had to work with JCG Events. I can’t wait to work with them again!

Make sure you check out the entire article at Floridian Weddings.

 

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It is funny how you take photos for someone and you never know where those photos could end up. The Deep Impact Quad boat photos have been everywhere; the Sun Sentinel, the Miami Herald, Time Square, and now the Boat Owner’s Middle East Magazine distributed in Dubai.

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My Deep Impact photos are everywhere, thanks to the Plantation Boat Mart’s PR girl, Natalie Mikolich . This past Sunday there was a special section for the Ft Lauderdale Boat Show that is coming up this weekend. One of the photos made it the front cover of the section and the Deep Impact article (with another photo) was the first article in the section. It’s so much fun seeing my work all over the place.

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My photo of the Quad Deep Impact was up in Time Square!!! Wahooo… another first!

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  • Liv - YOU ARE THE COOLEST!!!! 🙂 yay!

A couple weeks ago I had a great article in our local paper, “The Reporter.” Since some of you don’t live down here and can’t read the article I figured I would post it on the blog.

Young and Restless: Endearing Studios celebrates 5 years of capturing profiles
By Nancy Lucas, Special to The Reporter
Posted-Thursday, September 6, 2007 10:45 AM EDT
Michelle Young is a 27-year-old with happy brown curls that bounce around her up-do. At a slender 5-foot, 8-inches she’s hard to miss. If you saw her at a wedding in Ocean Reef, a corporate sales event in the Bahamas, or Justin’s second birthday in Key Largo you may have noticed she left alone — but with the most smiles. She averages 2,000 smiles per event. As a photographer and owner of Endearing Studios, that’s her job. And it’s just where her passion begins.

“I love what I do. It’s about telling people’s stories through images, not just taking pictures,” Young said. In constant motion, she’s attended more weddings, births, car shows, boat shows, birthdays and visited more homes across America and across the Atlantic than most other people have in the last five years, which is when she started her business. One of her favorite projects was creating a documentary for Crossroads Ministry, founded 20 years ago by Jana and Bob Amelingmeier. Crossroads works in the Dominican Republic with thousands of Haitian immigrants who scratch out a living next to the plentiful sugar cane fields. Crossroads offers the basics of housing, education, nutrition and healthcare.

While on assignment last summer to do the documentary for Crossroads, Young lived in the Dominican Republic for two-and-a-half months. She experienced firsthand the desperate needs of the people while living in a Haitian refugee village outside of Puerta Plata. Crossroads was there working on a project to build cement floors and tin roofs on some of the huts in the old villages. “I actually didn’t photograph as much as I thought I would because life in the village took up a lot of time,” Young said.

Each morning she fed Yesnie. He is a 6-year-old boy who weighed a little more than 30 pounds. “My job was to feed him a protein shake, eggs or salami every morning to put some weight on him,” she said. In addition, there was Isaac, a 6-month-old boy also living in the house where she stayed. He had been abandoned in a hospital to die when he was only a couple days old and a few pounds. She said, “When they found him his diaper had been on for so long it rotted into his body. You could see his intestines. But by the time I was there he was beautiful.”

She feels she learned more from the people she met in the Dominican then she ever did for them. “They taught me about the beauty in simplicity. How to have such joy even when you have nothing. To share. They have so little, yet they share everything.”
That’s how it feels to work with her. She has so little. Her spirit is humble yet she shares everything her clients experience through artistic images. For equipment she has a world-traveled backpack donning multicolored flag patches. It’s well organized with her digital Cannon cameras, several lens choices, spare batteries and handfuls of memory cards. She may carry additional bags with studio lighting, backgrounds or underwater housing.

On a bright and early Sunday morning, she had the privilege, in her words, of capturing Julia Hagen and Curtis Mollohan’s engagement photos. They wanted two different locations and looks to capture both traditional beach shots and something more personal to their relationship. The couple met while Julia was working as a receptionist at Curtis’s law office. “So, after the beach we headed over to his office and took some shots of them flirting with each other,” said Young.

After seeing the pictures of the couple on Young’s blog http://endearingstudios.blogspot.com) several friends commented, “The office shots were the cutest idea ever!! …. LOVE the office pic…it fits them so much! Beautiful couple! …. It shows how much you love each other.”

Following pregnancy photos, people commented they wish they had known Young earlier. After watching a birth video, Colleen Hammon of Plantation Key wrote, “What an awesome piece of work. It made me feel like I was there for the birth.” And Stephanie Gonzalez of Key Largo wrote, “Oh my gosh! I’m crying. It reminded me of Troy’s birth and how intimate it should always be. And the song, wow, I’m still crying!”
Young’s work has developed dramatically since the beginning. Her mom, a 25-year veteran art teacher, didn’t teach her about photography but did teach her composition, color, and design. With the basis to know the importance of contrast, line, and shape, she learned the technical side and history of photography at college. This is reflected in her work, which depending on the shoot, is done in a more photojournalistic style, candid. “I try to capture real emotion, feelings, smiles, laughter, and tears. This is hard to do in a formal posed setting,” she said.

Her clients appreciate that. They keep coming back. As a sign of her success, she has numerous repeat customers even with her prices on the high end of the scale. She’s photographed their engagements, weddings, pregnancy and then their babies. She adds, “And I look forward to photographing their babies when they graduate high school.”
After her own graduation from Island Christian School in 1998, she earned a degree in art studio with an emphasis in photography from Asbury College in Wilmore, Ky. She studied images of other photographers and especially liked Mary Ellen Mark because, she said, “Her images always had such deep emotions and feelings in them.”

Since then, she has trained four interns, and in 2005-2006 she taught photography at Island Christian. She continues to read and study on her own. Last week she attended the Florida Professional Photographers Convention in Orlando.

She is a member of Wedding and Portrait Photographers International, Professional Photographers of America, and Florida Professional Photographers.

Her future endeavors include starting a magazine, photographing in Africa for ministerial purposes, and opening a studio.

One of Michelle Young’s portraits of 2007 Island Christian Senior Veronica Arce.

A photo Michelle Young captured for the Crossroads Dominican Republic documentary in 2006.

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  • Liv - YOU KICK BUTT GIRL!!! Love you so much

  • ron - We love and support Jana &Bob and what an honor and priviledge it is!!

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