The Jackson Art Association invited me to speak about my photography and portrait projects at their monthly meeting in September 2026 at the Ella Sharp Museum in Jackson, Michigan.
Here is my talk, “Love & Photography,” in full, with audience questions – covering my work, my style, and the big “Why?”
Many thanks to the JAA for having me at their meeting, and for bringing such great questions.
Some photos from our local comic, culture, and all things nerdy expo – taken on the Canon EOS M6 and Viltrox 23mm f/1.4 during a rainy afternoon in downtown Jackson, Michigan.
After my wife’s grandmother passed away late last year, we’ve had a lot of…stuff…to sort through.
Now that the family has had their picks, it’s time to put up signs, open the doors, and host an estate sale.
While we waited for customers, I sorted through grandpa’s slide film collection – more on that later – and helped carry furniture out to trucks.
In the quiet moments, I captured what was left on my Canon EOS M6 and Viltrox 23mm f/1.4.
This August, we headed back up to Pentwater, Michigan – a beautiful west-coast town along Lake Michigan – for a week of sand, waves, and fellowship with some of our church members at Family Camp.
No wildfire haze masking the sunsets this year. In fact, during one sunset, I took our stand-up paddleboard and rowed out into Lake Michigan to watch the pink and blues take over the sky.
All images shot on the Canon EOS M2 and the EF-S 24mm f/2.8.
A few years back, Zach Snyder painted a hospital tunnel in Jackson with a freehand explosion of psychedelic color, connecting the Anderson Building, once a psychiatric facility, to the main hospital.
It turned out great, he thought, even though he had no sketch or plan.
After the mural was complete, the hospital reached back out. Patients were reacting to it, seeing shapes in the abstract color that weren’t meant to be there.
“Even people that weren’t in psychosis were like, ‘Is that supposed to be a dog?” Zach says.
Looking back, he understood why his mural caused such a reaction.
“In hindsight, I was like, ‘Why would I do that?’ No wonder.”
He went back and repainted the space himself, this time with flowers – something a little more gentle.
It was, he says, the first time he really did a mural.
That instinct – to go big first and adjust once real people react – runs through most of what Zach says about his path.
He grew up in Jackson, went to Jackson High, and started drawing seriously as a teenager holed up in his room.
“People started saying that’s really good, and then my ego got a little big, so I kept going,” he says.
He studied illustration at Grand Valley, where a painting class turned into the start of his artistic practice. His professor, Jill Eggers, noticed his resistance to painting still lifes and pushed him toward his own abstract color work instead, letting an assignment grow into a series that had nothing to do with the planned curriculum.
“She really nurtured my, I-don’t-want-anybody-to-tell-me-what-to-do attitude,” he says.
It gave him room to paint what he wanted and grow on his own terms. For his senior show, she suggested he try something large, so he built a 21-foot mural out of three 5-by-7 canvas panels and covered it in cheap mist-tint paint.
Today, that attitude helps him thrive in his perfect mural situations: a few notes or themes from the commissioner, but then total freedom to do his thing.
A gallery owner from that senior show connected him to his first mural job at Rockford Construction, where he learned to project and prep a wall.
He moved back to Jackson around 2019 and later painted the parrot mural on the Polly’s Country Market near Spring Arbor, a nod to a live parrot kept in the original store when it opened.
A woman confronted him mid-project over the purple background.
“Who in their right mind would paint that wall purple?” she asked. He second-guessed himself right up until it worked.
“Every project or everything I’ve ever done, I’ve been super nervous,” Zach says. “But it always turns out really great.”
Beating those nerves helped him create murals for Bright Walls, Grow Jackson, and several more in and around Jackson.
Today, Zach holds a full-time job at Consumers Energy and teaches art and design as an adjunct at Jackson College, work he credits with taking the pressure off making a living from his art.
“Once I got a full-time job, I thought, ‘okay, I can take a step back and really work on my craft without the pressure,’” he says.
He still paints murals a couple times a year, hosts vendor tables at ArtPop and the Art, Beer & Wine Festival, and moves between abstract shape work, digital drawing, landscapes, and the occasional portrait, mostly to see if he can pull one off.
Zach knows that range doesn’t build a marketable brand, and he’s okay with that.
“I don’t really ever want to limit myself,” he says. “I do everything just out of pure curiosity and enjoyment really.”
Color is what pulls Zach back in, whatever the format.
He traces some of that love of color and abstract forms to years of falling asleep to Pink Floyd, and the visionary work of artists Alex and Allyson Gray.
Mostly, though, Zach’s style comes from noticing things, like colors in nature or shapes in architecture. During spring a few years back, he watched the trees bloom and got fixated on how saturated the pinks and greens actually were.
Exploring color means he’s stopped trying to force any of his work into a single lane, or a single job.
“That’s how I landed where I’m at,” he says. “And I’m chilling. I like it.”
Visit Zach Snyder's website and follow him on Instagram.
There are times when I feel like an archeologist, or one of those National Geographic reporters who delves deep into the Amazon rainforest to discover a long-lost tribe.
For instance, I often go to heavy metal concerts. If you’ve seen me, I tend to stick out like a sore thumb. Maybe it’s all in my head, but I’m the average guy in the crowd who’s not covered in tattoos, chains, or sporting a mohawk haircut.
After photographing Abby Dawson for my Artists In Jackson project, I learned that she, her husband Phil, and her friend Gracie host a bi-annual festival called the Divine Pine Gathering:
Divine Pine Gathering is focused on traditional skill shares, ancestral knowledge, healing, arts, live music and movement.
DPG is as much a retreat into nature as it is a chance to connect to and learn from others. Divine Pine shows the power of love and community that results from gathering in an intentional way.
I love music and the arts, but for the rest of that description, I’m a newbie. So I came to this festival to take photos and learn something – another chance to be a relative outsider looking in.
And don’t get me wrong: I love this kind of experience. Since everything is new, everything is interesting, and I love using my camera to discover new ways of living. Of being.
And Divine Pine offered newness at every turn.
First, the land. Phil and Abby’s property in my hometown of Brooklyn, Michigan, was amazing. And huge. The festival sprawled across fields, under trees, up hills, and around wetlands.
I got my steps in walking from how-to classes to concerts to sound healing sessions.
Second, the people. Everyone was there for love and community, to learn and to live, and you could feel that in every concert, every talk, and every gathering that took place.
The vibes were everywhere, and those vibes were great.
I offered to take photos of the event in exchange for tickets to attend. This opportunity highlights that having a camera and offering your services will give you access to new experiences.
Selfishly, I wanted to be there, and if trading photos for tickets was the method, then I was up for it.
On Friday and Sunday of the festival, I brought along my Canon 6D with the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 as my general walking-around lens. It was flexible for most situations and, looking over the photos, did a bang-up job.
On Saturday, I brought along the rest of my family, so I traveled light with the Canon EOS M6 and mostly used the Viltrox 56mm f/1.4 for the reach. Sometimes I would switch to my kit zoom EF-M 15-45mm lens for extra flexibility.
In both cases, I made the right call. I got what I needed and never felt hampered by my photography gear.
What I came away with was an awesome new experience, some reconnections with old friends (and a few new ones), and a series of photos that I’m proud to share.
Those photos will help Phil, Abby, and the event team promote their next event on the Divine Pine website and social media.
For the last leg of our summer holiday, we traveled down to Hale, Michigan, to stay with my dad.
We try to do this every summer. My dad has an RV on his property, which helps us feel like we’re camping out, and we join my sister and other family members for a big get-together over the long summer weekend.
For the first part of our vacation, it was just us five – driving around Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula, going hiking, venturing out to see new places. Now, it was a big, noisy crowd of family. A capstone on our two-week getaway.
We went swimming and kayaking in the Rifle River Recreation Area, on a remote, wild lake. We grabbed the paddle board and paddled around Long Lake.
It was one of those #PureMichigan settings – the ideal version of what a vacation should be.
The sad part was that we’d be heading home after this was over.
But before that? We’d enjoy every minute of it.
Summer’s not over yet, after all.
Our usual summer holiday includes sticking to one spot, with a few exceptions.
This year, after we left Door County, we wandered around the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a week – first in Ironwood, then in Escanaba.
It was a vacation spent living out of our suitcases, constantly on the go.
First, Ironwood. We picked this little city because of its proximity to the Porcupine Mountains, an ancient volcano system weathered down to our present modest range of basalt and conglomerate.
During our first full day in Ironwood, we woke up for sunrise over the Lake of the Clouds.
There’s nothing the kids love more than to wake up at 3 AM to go hiking in the woods – except for just about anything else. But the view? Totally worth it.
After a bit more hiking down to the lake, we stopped by the Lake Superior shore to grab lunch and look at the rocks along the beach.
I took just a few minutes to stop along the road, on the way back, to grab shots of the local businesses.
Our cabin sat alongside the Black River, which empties out into Lake Superior. Along the way, you can hike down to a series of waterfalls along the river.
What I loved about this section of our trip was the hiking. We didn’t get a lot of forest bathing in Wisconsin, but here we had woods a-plenty, and it was good for all of us to hear nothing but birds and the strong river running.
For these hiking trips, the Canon EOS M6 – with its portability and light weight – was perfect: small and capable.
After a few days in Ironwood, we drove down to Escanaba, Michigan, along Lake Michigan, for a different view of the Great Lakes. Here, we found a beach on Sand Island that was great for swimming and sunbathing.
We also explored a bit of downtown Escanaba and a dam that sat outside our cabin on the Escanaba River.
That was it for the Upper Peninsula portion of the trip. From here, we headed south across the Mackinac Bridge to Hale, Michigan, to meet up with my family and finish up our summer vacation.
The Canadian wildfire smoke rolled into town yesterday.
Wednesday, we went to bed with clear skies. Thursday morning, I took the dog out in the morning, and there it was: a terrible smell, a yellowish haze, and a dramatic decrease in air quality – so much so that many summer events around town are getting delayed or canceled.
After work, I drove around town to get a sense of the situation. It was dramatic at the Jackson County Airport, where they shut down operations because of the air quality.
Around our own neighborhood, it looked like a foggy day all day long. The farther you looked in the distance, the more haze you could see.
My girls popped outside to do some quick squishy gluing, but other than that, they stayed inside – a bummer for summer, when they should be outside playing.
Global weirding is real.
Shot on the Canon R50v and Canon 5D (classic!).
For our family, summer means trips to Lake Michigan. In two hours, you can be right next to one of the world’s great bodies of fresh water.
Summer also means Pentwater, a little west coast town in Michigan that we frequent – either visiting family friends or participating in our church’s summer camp.
Pentwater is a classic Lake Michigan town: busy during the summer, but unlike some of the towns to the south, it retains its small-town charm.
And then, just outside of town, you get these quaint Lake Michigan beaches and fish stores – perfect for a family picnic.
You can’t miss when visiting these little western Michigan towns. Just ask all the Chicago residents who travel this way in the warmer months; their Chicago Bears bumper stickers give away their hometown.
This weekend, I attended my first artist expo at Jackson’s The Sparks summer open house.
Jen Dixon from my Artists In Jackson 2 project asked me to join. A free table around a bunch of artists and community members provided a great opportunity to promote my portrait projects and sell a few prints.
And that’s exactly what happened. I sold my Musicians In Jackson book and some select photo prints, talked to a bunch of great people, reconnected with some of the artists from my project, and added a few more subjects to the to-do list.
All in all, a good day filled with music, art, and self-promotion.
Shot on the Canon EOS M6 and EF-M 22mm f/2.
When Abby Dawson and her husband Phil decided to convert the back room of their Brooklyn, Michigan property into a ceramics studio, they ran into a minor structural reality: someone had built the room around a hot tub.
“We had to chainsaw the hot tub into four pieces,” she says, laughing, “and get it out.”
It’s a good starting point into how Abby works. To her, obstacles are just logistics.
The studio that replaced that hot tub room now sits surrounded by old spruce trees on land she describes, without irony, as divine (hence the name: Divine Pine Studios). It’s where she throws, hand-builds, glazes, fires, and occasionally drops a finished ceramic platter on the floor on purpose.
That last bit is all part of her process.
The only way out was demolition.
“I’ll have these videos of me doing slow-mos where I just take a huge platter, one where I put 10 hours into it, and I drop it and just watch it shatter,” Abby says. “You just have to be okay with things not working out.”
Abby grew up in Boynton Beach, Florida, moved to Michigan as a high school junior, and eventually landed at Adrian College, where she majored in psychology and art with a focus in art therapy.
Ceramics was the medium that stuck.
“The more you learn about it, the more you feel like you don’t know anything at all. It reminds me of yoga or religion: the deeper you go, the more you realize you are really still just a beginner,” she says. “And I find that genuinely exciting.”
Her ceramics work ranges from rainbow-blended mugs that sell out in minutes, to birch bark cups made with a broom-end tool that leaves tree bark-like marks, to mushroom bowls, sculptural wall hangings, and big platters with organic edges.
“Even if I never sold anything, I will always just make art,” she says. “I just want to make as much as I can.”
In her current work, Abby is moving toward mosaic murals and textured wall pieces assembled from dozens of small individually-glazed tiles. The idea is that many tiny things get combined into one larger shape.
Abby found her kiln, her first wheel, and a stockpile of ceramics supplies on Craigslist around 2016. The equipment was aging, some of it barely functional, and she lost entire kiln loads of work early on before she understood what she was dealing with.
She learned the hard way that ceramics is an unpredictable art that rewards patience and experimentation.
“You totally have to be okay with failure,” she says. “That’s how it goes.”
Her family’s property hosts the Divine Pine Gathering, a small festival she and Phil started in 2017 that has grown to roughly 600 attendees, 65 classes, 25-plus music acts, a free healing tent, a vendor village, and as many art installations as they can arrange. It runs every other year on their property, the last weekend of July. This year marks the tenth year of the event.
Abby describes running the Gathering the way a curator would talk about mounting a gallery show.
“How do I want people to feel when they’re here?” she says. “How do I want the space to make people feel?”
Since having two young children, Abby’s studio time has compressed. She stays up late after the kids are in bed, working by the fading light that remains.
Sometimes, she’ll go weeks without touching clay. Then she’ll spend an entire fall in a push to get items done in time for her annual holiday open studio sale.
But Abby doesn’t complain. It’s all about balance. She understands this is another, different season in her life and studio work – another obstacle to work around.
“I have like 10 things I’d love to do for myself in a day. And it’s like, okay, you can choose one of those things for like 20 minutes,” she says. “With our current stage and the kids being so young, they’re my priority. So I’ll stay up really late out here in the studio.”
Divine Pine Studios | Follow Divine Pine Studios on Instagram
Our daughter, Riley, took a chance on the running club at school. The culmination of the semester was participating in the local Tunnel to Towers 5k.
So we braved a rainy May morning and watched firefighters, first responders, and about 50 elementary students run through Sparks Park in Jackson.
I took this as an opportunity to try out my new-to-me Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 – an upgrade from my previous Tamron 24-135 f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens.
My review? Pretty good, especially for the $150 I paid for it used. I don’t usually need a full 24mm view, and the extra few stops of light are a nice touch.
Happy Memorial Day weekend, Americans.
Shot on the Canon 5D (classic!).
For years, Ari Simeone did not make art because he had learned not to.
As a kid growing up on Prince Edward Island in Canada, art was always around Ari. He drew with his father, who he calls “a fantastic artist,” and grew up in a family where creativity was part of everyday life.
“My grandmother was a teacher and she taught everything through the lens of art,” he says. “She taught math through art. She taught science through art.”
Then, for years, Ari stopped.
“While my parents were supportive, others in my life basically told me that to appear more normal, I should have nothing to do with art anymore,” he says. “And so I stopped cold turkey.”
Ari returned to painting during the pandemic, almost by accident, sitting at home with his daughter and a set of watercolors.
“We were painting and she looks at me and she’s like, ‘Why have I never seen you do this before?’” he says. “It felt like I got caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to.”
He told her he did not paint anymore. She returned with a question: “What do you mean ‘anymore?’ We’re going to fix that.”
That week, they went to the art store. Ari has been painting ever since.
“It felt like I was coming home. I remember how it felt when I stopped doing art, and I don’t want to wait for something dramatic to happen to get me to start again.”
Much of Simeone’s work begins as translation.
“Everything that would come in through the day, whether it be things I hear or see, I would kind of lock myself in this quiet space in my house, and I would just start painting,” he says. “Everything that came in would come out.”
Ari describes the work as “a visual representation of audio and sensory input,” often building abstract landscapes shaped by motion, sound, and atmosphere rather than fixed, figurative subjects.
He says static days make for stagnant art. That instinct eventually led Ari out of solitude and into public performance.
When Ari learned about and entered his first Art Battle, where a panel of artists would compete for votes, he didn’t expect much. The format was everything his process had not been: loud, crowded, timed, and public.
“I thought, this is a neat idea. I would like to watch it, but I’m probably going to hate doing it.”
Instead, he loved it. Ari won his first round, then the next, then states, then went on to compete at nationals in Florida.
Along the way, he found a new way of working.
“Painting in public, there’s always new input,” he says. “There’s always something unexpected or unusual that happens. And part of me just thrives on that.”
Now Ari regularly paints live at festivals and performances, building pieces in real time while musicians play – like at Manchester Underground, at River Raisin Distillery, where he is a focal point of the monthly performances.
“I go and paint the music.”
At Art 634 in Jackson, Simeone’s studio has become both workspace and community space – a place to paint, experiment (he’s working on a creature-building card game), and let people see the work as it happens.
That openness and vulnerability are a result of the lessons Ari learned early on, when he was discouraged from creating.
“One of the thrills I get is from sharing my art and having people be just as excited or more about my art than I am,” he says. “Part of the completion of a piece is also others seeing it. Then my art gets to go out and see the world, too.”
Ari is still nervous making art in public, but that nervousness no longer decides whether the work gets made.
“I’m afraid of this thing,” he says, “so I’ll do it anyways.”
Grabbed some tree blossoms at golden hour, before they disappear for the season.
Shot on the Canon 6D and Helios 44-2 58mm f/2.
Sidney Wallace will try just about anything once.
She’s sketched, painted, made wire jewelry, picked up beading, decorated cakes, attempted a tattoo apprenticeship, and, at one point, filmed her own drawing tutorials for YouTube.
That last one didn’t really take off.
“That didn’t really go well,” she says, laughing it off.
She’s in her early 20s and lives in Vandercook Lake. The through line in everything she does isn’t any particular medium. It’s curiosity.
Sidney’s mostly self-taught. As a kid, she would track down one of those YouTube tutorials just to figure out how something worked.
Art teachers in middle and high school kept her motivated, and she’s always had her dad – and her boyfriend, David – in her corner, cheering her on.
By chance, Sidney stumbled across an event on Facebook called Art Battle at Art 634.
The idea is simple: 10 artists, 20 minutes to paint something from scratch, and the audience votes on a winner.
She psyched herself up and signed up for the first-ever Art Battle in Jackson and won the whole thing. Then, Sidney entered the next competition and earned second place.
“If I can do that in 20 minutes, imagine what I can do in a few hours,” she says.
Those competitions lit a fire. Sidney started painting more seriously and found her people at Art 634, where she began vending and building connections in the local art community.
Sidney admits she has ADHD, and she’s open about what making art does for her.
When she’s deep in a piece, everything else disappears.
“My whole focus is on that piece,” she says. “It feels like my brain is pretty much shut off and in my hand, going at it.”
Music helps, too. Bring Me the Horizon used to be her go-to. Lately, Sidney enjoys a mix of rock and some hip-hop, but the purpose is the same: block out the noise and lock in on her craft.
Ask Sidney what her favorite things to make are, and she’ll land on line art and jewelry.
Lately, she started using cheap pens from Dollar as a challenge, but also because they work.
“I just find it fun using cheaper stuff, see what I can do with it,” she says. “Why spend all this money on expensive stuff when the cheaper stuff, you do the same thing?”
Sidney’s jewelry-making started with wire crafts and a short-lived Etsy shop, then she fell down a research rabbit hole into beading.
Each of these media keeps her laser-focused. Sometimes, she’ll sit for hours without looking up.
Sidney’s day job is cake decorating at Country Market, a skill a supervisor handed her after noticing she was artistic. She’s been doing it since 2017 and brings the same care to a cake as she does to a canvas.
Her long-term vision is a bakery and gift shop where she sells her own work and gives other local artists a place to sell theirs, too.
“I want to have my stuff out there and have stuff to have like forever homes, people enjoying my art,” Sidney says.
You can find Sidney’s work on Facebook.
Had the chance to shoot some Artists In Jackson photos at the River Raisin Distillery in Manchester, Michigan, this weekend.
It was a great venue with amazing light. Lots more to come.
Shot on the Canon EOS M6 and Viltrox EF-M 23mm f/1.4.
Want to know a secret?
I’m a wrestling fan. Have been since I was a kid.
So when an old friend, who came out of a four-year retirement to wrestle, gave me a heads-up on some indy wrasslin’ for a good cause? Count me in.
I took my daughter, who joins me for my annual Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania watches, to watch a series of surprisingly good matches. The Headlock On Hunger event even included a 20-man battle royale.
This could easily become a longer-term project for me.
The sweaty gym setting. The vocal crowd. The hard hits and potential bumps – it was all there. And it was a blast to capture.
Shot on the Canon 5D mark II and EF 100mm f/2.8, and EOS M6 with the Viltrox 23mm f/1.4.
Early in the pandemic, our youngest daughter, Riley, had to celebrate her birthday outside. Social distancing and flattening the curve – you remember all that.
Of course, it rained. But family and friends still came by to wish her a happy birthday.
Shot on the Canon 5D (classic!) and EF 40mm f/2.8.
For Valentine’s Day, we were gifted a charcuterie-making class at Sandhill Crane Vineyards.
So: date night! We learned how to carve radishes, arrange cheeses, and cut pepper blossoms, all while enjoying live music and plenty of wine.
To stay unobtrusive, I brought along my Canon EOS M6 and the Viltrox 23mm f/1.4 – a great combo for these kinds of low-light situations.
February was rough for me. Emotionally, work-wise – everything felt like it was crashing down.
My family noticed how irritable I was. I felt it, too: waking up every day tired, wanting to go to bed early every night.
I was in a funk. So I got out of the house.
It’s amazing what a little sunshine and fresh winter air will do for the spirit.
And not to oversimplify it, but getting in my car, driving around town, and making photos was exactly what I needed.
I had my mental photo checklist handy – little spots around town that, given the right light, I wanted to visit and photograph. So I grabbed my trusty Canon 5D (classic!) and 40mm lens, along with a new pickup – the EF 200mm f/2.8 – and hit the town.
This evening was perfect, with the sun setting and the snow turning blue. I stopped at everything from mall parking lots to rooftop parking garages, and lots of places in between.
“Make your own little adventure,” I kept telling myself. Grab the dog, throw the camera gear in the car, and hit the road. Just because.
It does a soul good.
Looking through my photo archives recently, I stumbled on photos from a memorable winter trip with my now-wife to South Haven, Michigan. The result of that trip was one of my favorite photos.
I know: we Michiganders are wacky. In college, I took a spring break trip north, to Toronto, instead of south, as most sane people do.
And here we were, a fairly young couple during a freezing cold February, taking a weekend holiday to the icy Lake Michigan shore. We spent a day walking around South Haven, talking to some locals, and wandering over to the lighthouse to catch an amazing winter sunset.
It was there, on the walkway out to the lighthouse, that I caught this couple holding hands while they shuffled along the path:
It might be one of my most enduring pictures: it won first prize in my local county fair photo competition, it remains one of my most-viewed photos on Flickr, etc. This photo is one of my favorites, too (though it’s hard to go wrong in South Haven, especially in the summer).
When we talk about photos and light as feelings, this is an example of an image that has endured.
