Michael T. Jermyn looks down at stacks of photographs he's taken recently. They're spread across the floor of his home in Montpelier, which he admits is about to burst at the seams from all his photos. Another 200 framed shots hang from groaning walls.

His last name, he says by way of introduction, means 'the German' And it's pronounced 'German,' but 'Germaine' in Ireland. His red hair ("Not much left after three kids, but I still have my boyish enthusiasm. Some people say I look like a leprechaun.") can be linked to one of his ancestors – the Irish rebel "Red" Hugh O'Neill who lived in the 1600s.

But back to the matter at hand.

Jermyn's busy preparing for his fourth annual December gallery showing at Montpelier's La Brioche bakery and café, which has proven lucrative in past years, he says.

"Everything's in a wonderful state of disarray," he says, looking over his collection. I work in a fabulous state of constant chaos," says Jermyn, 45, who brought his wife and their three kids to Vermont from New York's Hudson Valley five years ago.

Jermyn's specialty is still life and landscape photography.

His inspiration comes from paintings by the old masters. "People look at it (one of his photographs) first, and ask: 'Oh, my god. Is that a painting?' The feedback I've gotten over the past few years has been overwhelming … I think I'm on the right track."

Jermyn says he honed his craft — and began making money — by photographing the old Dutch houses that dot the Hudson Valley landscape, then selling framed prints to their owners. His first sale in the mid-1990s was to an "ornery Russian woman," whose 1712 Dutch stone house was crammed with artwork. When Jermyn delivered his finished, framed photograph for which he was paid $175, there was no room to hang it.

"She said: 'Take down that French painting.' I took down the painting. It was an original Pissarro! Where do you go after this? Putting up a Jermyn and taking down a Pissarro? This is the zenith of my career; it's all downhill from here," he says with a laugh.

"The one thing I didn't want to fall into was the trap of photographing cows and barns," Jermyn says of life as a Vermont photographer, so he continued photographing old houses and landscapes. But Vermont was, and is, different, he says. "Here it's real villages, real people. It's not a collection of trophy houses."

Among Jermyn's favorite Vermont subjects are vegetables – especially chili peppers.

He says he has a bartering relationship at the Montpelier Farmers Market, which has given him subject matter. "I'm not looking with my stomach. I'm looking with my eyes. Looking for vegetables with character. First I photograph them; then I eat them!"

Jermyn, who earned a degree in business in 1984 from the State University of New York College at Oneonta, says he turned to photography when it became apparent to him that a career in business was the wrong choice.

After a decade of working in New York City in the insurance and finance industries, Jermyn says, "I realized it wasn't my calling. And nobody remembered my name. I was never going to be a great businessman, so I fell back on what I did best."

Though largely self-taught, Jermyn says he did take some photography courses in college and developed his own film until four years ago when he joined the digital bandwagon. He still does all his own printing, however.

Jermyn's photos, the prices of which range from $45 to $1,500, have been featured at galleries throughout central Vermont, most recently at the Bryan Memorial Gallery in Jeffersonville.

Lately, Vermont's music community has taken note of Jermyn's style. The cover of The Bluegrass Gospel Project's 2005 CD, "Wander On," features a Jermyn photo: a guy ambling down a country road. The guy happens to be Jermyn, and the photo is one in a series of self-portraits that he describes as "the man in a black suit" or "the mystical guy." In his series, this spectral-like figure is seen walking down misty roads and across fields.

Another Vermont group, Rusty Romance, looked to Jermyn to shoot the cover of its 2005 CD, "Who Brought The Fun?"

That sepia-toned photograph shows another side of Jermyn: his passion, perhaps obsession, for collecting Americana. He scours rummage sales, flea markets and yard sales for old bottles and antique knickknacks, which he uses to create his still-life photographs. He also buys old picture frames, by the dozens, which he uses to frame his own work.

"These (flea markets) are repositories of Americana," he says. Sometimes he'll shoot his still lifes onsite, setting up shop in an old barn. "(With still lifes) I get to rub shoulders with the old masters a little bit. I'm still trying to bridge that gap between painting and photography. I paint with the lens. In my still lifes, I'm very exact. My landscapes? Irish luck."

As a photographer who's taken thousands of images of nature, Jermyn says he is still amazed with Vermont's fall. "Every year Mother Nature slams me upside the head." He adds that he enjoys nothing more than getting his camera, tripod and muck boots and heading out on a country road.

This love of nature has led Jermyn to set his sites on publishing a book of Vermont photographic images titled "Discovering The Secret Language Of The Trees And Other Epiphanies." Jermyn says he is in the process of contacting publishers and hopes to have something as early as spring.

The title for this book, he says, comes from his old Irish granny who told him that trees were sacred and they contained the spirits of our ancestors.

Patrick Timothy Mullikin writes regularly for Vermont Sunday Magazine and is a part-time copy editor at The Times Argus.