Form and Flow

Photographer Emily Skiba and surfboard shaper Josh Weisfeld blend their unique passions, reflecting the growing mix of skills and perspectives shaping Alpena’s creative landscape.

Written by Bret Hauff with Photography by Oliver Van Assche

Alpena, Michigan -- It started with an evening on a beach. Emily Skiba was walking toward the ocean on the west coast of Maui when Josh Weisfeld noticed her and her vintage surfboard. The two chatted and went their separate ways, each on their own path. Until the next day.

Their relationship blossomed after Josh walked downstairs from his apartment above an autobody shop, where he saw Emily sitting at the receptionist’s counter. He “worked his magic,” Emily said, bringing her breakfast tacos and smoothies, and making faces at her while she spoke with customers.

The two bonded over their shared interest in the ocean, in the scarce moments they had when they weren’t hustling to make ends. They formed a community of friends, with whom they wandered  Maui and its shorelines.

In the following years, Emily developed an interest in photography, which turned into a passion, then a career; Josh created a place for himself in Maui’s surfboard industry, in which he refined his style and established an enterprise in the mecha of surf culture — all the while leaning into each other for support and comfort.

Josh and Emily married in 2023 in Michigan, where she was born and raised. Less than a month after they returned to Lahaina, the deadliest wildfire in modern American history ripped through the town, incinerating hundreds of buildings — including their home.

They contemplated their future and decided the move to Michigan just made sense. They knew a number of people lost in the fire, which burned most of their possessions. They left the island for Northeast Michigan in 2024, and their talents and enterprises followed.

Emily and Josh have since melded their lives and established a young family in Alpena. Their son Bodhi — “the grom” — has captured their adoration. Josh’s JAW Surfboards builds high-quality, hand-crafted custom surfboards for clients around the country. Emily Skiba Photography offers portraiture of families, couples, and weddings, as well as captures photos for brands and lifestyle in the region.

And while their story has already started, their journey has just begun.

A World Apart

Josh grew up on Maui's north shore, although he didn’t surf much as a kid. The scene was hyper competitive, and he wasn’t very good. Downhill skateboarding was more his thing.

In college, he met “this hippie dude” who noticed his downhill skateboard in a public access film class. The guy had crafted windsurf boards in the past and said he could make a skateboard like Josh’s. He sent Josh to buy the materials, and “I remember looking at it, all of it, like … how's this gonna be a skateboard?” 

When Josh returned to Maui, he began surfing. He was driving around his hometown one day and noticed a downhill skateboarding sticker on a truck parked on the top of a hill. He left a note, and the two linked up later. He too had built boards and shared more advanced board-building techniques with Josh. 

Josh spent dozens of hours researching the history and art of surfboard building, and shaped his first surfboard in 2013. It was a dud. So he built another, and another. After almost a dozen, he started ditching work to create boards. “And I was like, ‘Hey, I should try and see if I could get a job doing this.’”

— — —

Emily almost always had access to a point-and-shoot camera growing up in Alpena, but she didn’t really have an eye for photography in the beginning. It was just fun.

In college, she realized what she wanted was a flexible lifestyle. After graduation, she saw most of her peers getting corporate jobs, and “I'm just like, ‘Dude, I don't know. I feel like this is not for me right now.’” So she found an opportunity that would allow her to go as far as she could get from the Midwest: New Zealand

She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do when she landed. Money got tight after a couple of months, so she moved with friends to Raglan, a “bohemian surf town” on the western coast of the northern island, where she learned to surf.

After a few years, she returned to Alpena. As she mulled her next step, some friends from New Zealand invited her to Hawaii, and had lined up a job, room, and vehicle for her on the island.

Five days later, she “peaced out and flew to Maui.” She packed light. But her trip extended as she made friends, surfed, and secured a job shooting photos on whale-sighting boat tours. “I'm out on a boat in the ocean, and I'm seeing these gorgeous animals every day, it's like, ‘OK, I want to do this.’”

Practice Makes Perfect

Emily spent nearly every day on Maui with a camera in her hand. When she wasn’t shooting on the boats, she was freediving with friends touring the island to “just play around and have fun.” She felt lucky to see the plethora of ocean dwellers. 

Her friend Tiffany Morgan, owner and operator of Sea Gods & Journeys and Tiffany Morgan Photography, spoke of Emily’s love of interacting with marine life. She remembered Emily’s elation after photographing a manta ray. “She was so overjoyed she was hard to understand on the phone!” Tiffany wrote me. “I knew she would have the memory forever etched in her mind, and I love that it’s something we share.”

As the months passed, exhaustion mounted. Being “hammered by the sun” wore on her. “Shooting, culling your gallery, editing your gallery, and then also doing your sales at the end, before you even get off the boat, is very high pressure and intense.” 

But fatigue didn’t diminish the beauty of capturing photographs that “were so amazing and so unique.” Instead of bailing, she went part-time and got another gig shooting at a hotel in an attempt to balance her work and social life.

As she gained experience and confidence, she began building a client base for herself. The intimate nature of shooting portraiture helped her develop an ability to connect with clients. “The best part with photography and part of the creativity process is not just being, like, ‘stand in front of the camera and smile.’”

Then, COVID ground the tourism industry to a halt. So, she reoriented: “I could put more effort into and time into my own business.” She developed her website and boosted her social media presence to engage clients. 

She maintained relationships with people she met in her prior work. Her unique and intimate style provided her with the latitude to build and grow her business. Then the fire came.

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Josh took the first boards he created to surfboard builders in a repurposed cannery on Maui’s northern coast. He crafted his boards based on what he learned online and techniques he saw in the classic board design that he admired. All of them turned him away. 

He soon thereafter secured a job at one of the largest surfboard factories on the island. He did touchups on boards before they went to the showroom, then fed pre-molded boards into a CNC machine for shaping. “I was able to get repetition, and I touched literally thousands of boards.”

The longer he spent there, the more chances he had to talk with tradesmen. He’d buy them lunch, and they’d offer advice or see him struggling and show him proper techniques. But the work became monotonous, and that frustrated him.

So he moved to Lahaina, where he worked at a surfboard repair shop and further honed his skills. The shop had secured a contract to maintain a fleet of boards for a local business and he became familiar with board design. The job also offered more freedom to create his own boards, “focusing my magnifying glass, forgetting about the rest of the world.”

Josh met Ryan Lovelace, one of the most prolific hand-shapers of surfboards on the planet, while scoping a swell and offered him a spot in his studio to shape boards. Ryan saw that Josh “clearly was on his own trip … his colors and his vibe and what he was making were his own kind of thing,” he wrote me. For Josh, seeing Ryan shape boards inspired him to start hand-crafting them himself.

Josh then established his own business and met his new neighbor, Bob “Ole” Olson, the “oldest living surfboard builder” and who has produced over 10,000 boards. The two developed “quite a cool friendship over time and, like, an unofficial mentorship.” 

But Ole was at times reluctant to teach Josh his craft. When Ryan returned to Maui on a professional trip, he shaped boards with Josh and shared techniques that made Josh “infinitely better.”

Josh moved from a tiny shop to a 5,000-square-foot building, where he built his own factory with the help of friends and family. He designed a showroom and workspace with windows, so customers could see him do his work. 

Josh saw himself as more than just a craftsman: He embraced his role as a community figure. He hosted board swaps where people could bring almost any type of water equipment. “Subconsciously, it was like a surf-education center,” he told me. “It brought people together, and then also broadened people's, like, surf horizons.”

The fire ended that.

A New Home

The first time I met Josh for a one-on-one interview, I walked up a dark staircase into a musty room. A waft of polyurethane and surf rock emanated from behind a door. The bright-white light of his workshop is reminiscent of a doctor’s office, splattered with paint and organized around surfboard stands instead of surgical tables. 

His precision as he cut crosshatched layers of fiberglass with electric sheers exemplified what he later described as an “ultra methodical” practice. “Something Ryan would always say, it’s like, to get a good polish, it all goes in reverse.” The finished product is an amalgamation of the precision of each step of the process.

His journey to surfboard building wasn’t a product of planning: “It’s just through a series of choices that led me there, you know, just enjoying it.” He has learned to give himself “the grace to make mistakes.” It’s a process of chasing perfection. “That goal post is sliding — my eye for detail, like, it’s ongoing.”

— — —

The August evening sun reflected in the Thunder Bay river, casting a soft glow on a family of four that Emily had met that evening for a photo shoot.  She cooed at a toddler as she squirmed in her mother’s arm, and sank to a squat as the girl bobbled down a brick path lined with native flowers. The young boy stood back to back with his father, who had just coaxed his son back from the water’s edge. “Give him knucks,” she said. “Now give him a great big hug.”

As the weather turns cooler, her work slows. The work comes in waves. Not many people will agree to an hour or more for a photo shoot in the cold — and Emily prefers natural light over the shine of a light bulb. It's hard for her to capture moments indoors that match her storytelling style: “I want to capture just like, raw emotion.

“When I see people sharing pictures that I took of them, it's like, Oh, my God, … it's so cool to see you guys choosing those photos, because they're great. They were my favorites that I personally took, but I'm glad that they liked them.”

— — —

Alpena is a small town, and the opportunities it offers can be slim. Northeast Michigan has a slow market, and Emily and Josh continue to operate out of Maui to supplement their income.

Josh secured that contract to maintain the rental fleet in Maui, and now provides a commission for an employee who works out of a surfboard workshop he built in the back of a box truck after the fire. Emily works with four photographers in Maui, who still meet with many of her clients that she established years ago. She edits their photos to match “the look that I portray.”

Tourists to Northeast Michigan have started contacting Emily for shoots during the summer season after discovering her on Google or social media. Josh has attended surfing events on the west side of the state — where the sport has gained popularity — and has some of his boards in surf shops near popular surf areas. 

The two swap parental duties to give each other time to do their own thing, or when one is trying to eat as Bodhi reaches for their utensils. They stop and chat at restaurants, community events, or on trips to get groceries. And their creativity supplements the blooming arts community in Alpena.

The grind of early life has passed, and they now ride the swells of life as they settle into Northeast Michigan’s cultural hub.

— — —

Emily can be reached at emilyskibaphotography.com or through Instagram @emilyskiba_photography. Josh can be reached at jawsurfboards.com, through Instagram @jaw.surf, or jawsurfboards.com.surfboards@gmail.com.

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This iteration of the Local Creative Highlight Series was proudly produced with financial support from the