Professional Services in Troy

Humble Design helps low-income families create new lives after transitioning from homelessness by furnishing their homes with repurposed furniture and supplies. It conducts home makeovers largely with donated and used items, creating thrifty and eco-friendly home designs for families in the Metro area, including many single-parent families and victims of domestic abuse. Reusing cleaning products and large pieces of furniture simultaneously help families create comfortable living spaces, and keeps these items out of Detroit’s overflowing landfills.

Though Treger Strasberg and Ana Smith, the co-founders of Humble Design, spent nearly two months on their first house, they now handle as many as seven a week, according to an interview in the New York Times. Their team starts each redesign by giving family members beds for sleeping, pots for cooking, kitchen tables for family meals, and dressers to store clothing. The volunteers pick up the furniture from homes with excess supplies and deliver them to the families for free. They then undertake a full home makeover, cleaning the space and supplying rugs, lamps, and flowers to create a warm environment.

Brian Masserman shot his first wedding at 15, armed with a Kodak Instamatic. Though it wracked his nerves to wait a week for his photos to develop, he knew he'd found a calling. A member of the Professional Photographers of America for more than 20 years, he now captures special occasions and intimate moments after consultations in which he tailors his photographic style to his customers’ needs, following his personal mantra: "There is no such thing as a perfect photograph, but there are such things as perfect moments."

During the more than 600 weddings they've photographed, Brian and his two staffers have varied their approach, sometimes snapping candid pictures of revelers and other times relying on a more journalistic feel. His skills stretch to include family portraiture and commercial work, and his senior portraits crackle in black and white, color, or mixtures of the two. After photo-shoots, he employs a keen sense of design to help customers to decide their print style, and even travels to their homes to find a place to hang their prints.

Brian always seeks to develop concrete relationships with customers and has even chronicled the milestones of one client from her bat mitzvah to her wedding day. To share his expertise, he hosts intensive workshops in which he drills students in camera settings, composition, and abbreviated editing techniques. He and his staff believe in the visual power of physical prints and frame and restore photos and love letters written on cheeseburger wrappers. They also print photographic images onto more eclectic material such as canvas, wood, and aluminum.

Nature photographer Mike Moats deals exclusively in evocative and otherworldly up-close shots. His workshops can last anywhere from three hours to three days, and cover general image-making techniques, such as controlling depth of field, composition methods, and postshoot digital processing. Moats also teaches his students to think like photographers: lessons often cover selecting a subject in any season and working in natural light. With proper grounding in the theory and practice of shooting tiny subjects, macro-photographers will have plenty to shoot no matter where they live, unlike photographers who specialize in Leap Day lunar eclipses. :m]]

Animal Aid Foundation works each day to place lost or unwanted pets in permanent homes through rescue and community-outreach programs. One day, the organization hopes to open a no-kill shelter to help reduce pet overpopulation and provide an alternative to shelters that practice euthanasia.

On a typical day, Animal Aid Foundation volunteers might review pet-adoption applications, transport shelter animals to the veterinarian for vaccinations, or remove animals from shelters with high euthanasia rates and place them in foster care. Volunteers also deliver pet food to low-income families and help run community-outreach programs that provide necessities such as bedding and doghouses.

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South Oakland Shelter partners with more than 60 area religious institutions to provide housing opportunities for displaced people. Its guests receive a place to sleep at the partner congregation, warm meals, and opportunities to plan housing situations with case managers. The shelter also organizes targeted homelessness-prevention efforts including direct financial assistance, career-development and financial-literacy workshops, and support groups. Because of its work with more than 8,000 volunteers annually—who interact with guests and arrange sleeping spaces—SOS was named Outstanding Volunteer Program by the Michigan Governor’s Service Awards in 2009.

Metro 37 Recording Studios' full-service recording, mixing, and mastering facility sprawls across 4,000 feet in Rochester Hills. Emmy Award–winning producer, engineer, and keyboardist Kevin Sharpe heads the studio's accomplished staff of songbirds. Armed with an arsenal of equipment at their disposal, the crew specializes in perfecting everything from tunes to voice-overs while working with an array of people including bands, singer/songwriters, and rap artists. Inside, a pair of control areas overlook the live room, which sits surrounded by ISO booths, a mix-and-mastering suite, and an artist apartment that sleeps up to eight people or three-and-a-half people in sumo suits. The studio also boasts an extensive clientele list, including Interscope and Wind-up Records, as well as major corporations such as the Ford Motor Company.