When displaying her photographs at juried summer art festivals across Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Pennsylvania, Michelle Cimprich hears the same comment again and again.

“People say to me, ‘You’re way too young to ‘see’ these types of things.’”

Her black and white photographs are at once poetic, nostalgic, haunting and timeless.

A visual scavenger, Cimprich has spent the past two decades shooting in adandoned locales — farmhouses, churches, dairy farms, greenhouses, cemeteries, amusement parks.

In her images, loneliness co-exists with weathered beauty.

“I could shoot every day. I’m really into all the details,” Cimprich, 39, says. “Just wandering around a cemetery and realizing that someone carved all those granite statues.”

Lately, her outlook as an artist has been evolving. “I’m totally inspired by the miracle of life, natural surroundings, botanical stuff. I’ve been shooting a lot of trees. The human spirit is awed by trees.”

Cimprich houses her photographs in handsome antique frames that add texture, dimension and character. Some are gilded, some weathered, some elaborately carved. All are one-of-a-kind.

“I’ve been collecting frames for 20 years and doing photography for 22 years,” Cimprich says. “They started as separate pastimes.”

She has racks and racks filled with vintage frames in all shapes, sizes and varieties.

One day a week in the summertime, Cimprich and her husband, Rob, go frame hunting, at antiques shops, shows, and malls and flea markets. Medina, Burton and Springfield are favorite destinations.

“The most I’ve spent is $200. The least I’ve spent is a buck, and that one was teeny,” she says about her frame finds.

Despite the ease and enhancement advantages of digital photography, Cimprich continues to work exclusively in film. She does all her own printing as well, in a well-equipped darkroom in the basement of her home.

“It’s nuts. I’m nuts,” she readily confesses about her adherence to costly and time-consuming processes. But the proof is in her traditional silver prints, she feels.

“When my kids are grown, I would love to learn all the old photo processes — platinum, bromoils,” she notes.

Cimprich grew up in Canton, graduated from St. Thomas Aquinas High School, then earned her B.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame, where she majored in graphic design and minored in photography. After college, she honed her printing skills with a darkroom job at Martin Reuben Photography in Cleveland. She waitressed at Mulligan’s Pub for eight years, and worked at Easterday’s Flower Shop and Rice’s Nursery.

She and her husband of seven years, Rob Cowie of North Canton, have two children, Lily, 6, and Flynn, 4. Together, they operate Suncrest Gardens, an upscale garden center on Akron-Cleveland Road between Hudson and Peninsula. Michelle buys the annuals, perennials, tropicals and gifts.

As if that weren’t enough to keep the couple busy in the warm-weather months, they also do about a dozen outdoor art shows a year under the name Wandering Paths Photography.

She will be at the Lakewood Arts Festival on Aug. 4, Art on the Green in Hudson on Aug. 25 and 26, and the Wonderful World of Ohio Mart at Stan Hywet Hall in Akron from Oct. 4 through 7.

“Rob has helped me so much getting my work out there,” she says. The packing, hauling and unpacking of the antique-framed photographs — his part of the operation — is a careful and involved process.

“Men like my work as much as women, which really surprises me,” says Cimprich, who for a dozen years has exhibited locally at Art is Alive. “I’ve got a lot of customers who I see year after year at shows. I’ve got collectors who have eight to 15 pieces, which is unbelievable to me. They send me photos of my pictures hanging on their walls!”