Ninety-five percent of my vacations have been with my family. Only one has ever been a vacation with my friends. Pretty sad.

It gets sadder that there’s likely never going to be another friends vacation for us. We’re in the stages of life that include careers, engagements, marriage, and babies, which often makes it difficult to arrange time, even weekend getaways, to see each other. Unfortunately, that’s the sad truth of life and growing up. 

Paul Jaekel has had an interest in photography for many, many years. For a long while, he only took the usual pictures of clouds and nature with his cell phone. Then, in early 2015, he started fully acting on that growing interest by turning it into an amateur hobby. As a lifelong resident of Southeastern Michigan, he began by driving around to places nearby his home. As he ventured, he found places that he never stopped at before. Later, he traveled to places further out from home - towards Detroit and up into the thumb of Michigan.

I'm always inspired whenever I look at Instagram, but some photographers seem to have that extra SOMETHING that makes their photos stand out from the 737 photos that are uploaded every second (!!). One such photographer is our Photographer of the Month, Greg Viau, a Michigan photographer that truly shares the beauty in this world, photo by photo.

Courtney Quirin is a wildlife biologist turned environmental journalist and documentary filmmaker. She has reported for Al Jazeera America in San Francisco and for The Associated Press in Johannesburg, South Africa. Courtney's first documentary, which was her thesis at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, won the 2015 CINE Golden Eagle Award for Best Student Documentary and the Margaret & William Hearst Award for Excellence in Documentary Film.