Shelley B Photography comes directly to your Gulf Shores beach house or vacation rental for your family session. No logistics, no parking — just step outside and we're there.
Vacations with kids are a careful balance of spontaneity and logistics. Every activity involves a calculation: parking, timing, who carries what, how far does the baby have to walk, is anyone going to melt down before we get there. The last thing most families want is to add more coordination to the mix for their photo session.
So we made a simple decision early on: we come to you.
I'm Shelley, and together with Blaine, we photograph families across Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, Fort Morgan, and Perdido Key. In every case, we drive directly to your vacation rental — your beach house, your condo, your rental property — and we meet you right there. You don't figure out parking. You don't haul the kids across a crowded beach access point. You step outside, we walk to the water together, and we start.
There are photographers who work out of specific beach access points and ask families to meet them there. It's a perfectly reasonable model. But we kept hearing the same thing from families: the logistics of getting everyone to a meeting point added stress to an evening that was supposed to be relaxed.
Beach photography works best when everyone arrives calm. When the kids haven't been rushed or overheated on a long walk. When the parents haven't spent 20 minutes circling a parking lot. When the whole family shows up to the session already in vacation mode rather than errand mode.
Coming to your rental eliminates all of that. We handle the driving. We find the parking. We show up at your door ready to go. Your only job is to be dressed and excited.
We come to your specific rental property — wherever it is along the Gulf Coast. That might be a beachfront condo in Orange Beach, a large vacation house on Fort Morgan Peninsula, a rental in a Gulf Shores neighborhood a few streets back from the water, or a property right on the sand in Perdido Key.
If your rental has private beach access, we use it. This is often our favorite scenario — a private stretch of beach that belongs to your property, with no crowds, no strangers in the background, and complete freedom to move and shoot without working around other beachgoers.
If your rental doesn't have private access, we walk with you to the nearest beach access point and find the right spot from there. We scout before every session to know exactly where we're going and what the conditions will look like.
Either way, the experience for your family is the same: walk out the back door, head to the water, and start a beautiful evening.
We arrive at your rental about 5-10 minutes before the session start time. We introduce ourselves, do a quick walk to the beach to assess the light and conditions, and then we get started.
Shelley works with your family on posed portraits — classic, beautiful compositions that capture your family at their best. Blaine moves freely around the session, capturing candid moments, creative angles, and wide panoramic images at different focal lengths.
We use a Hasselblad medium format camera at 100 megapixels — the same system used by the world's top portrait photographers. Every image we capture, whether it's a sweeping panoramic of your family against the Gulf horizon or a close-up of a toddler discovering a shell, is captured at extraordinary resolution. Your gallery files are large enough to print at any size without quality loss.
Sessions typically run 60-90 minutes, ending naturally as the golden hour light fades after sunset. By the time we pack up and leave, your family has had a beautiful evening at the beach together — and in a few weeks, a gallery of images that make that evening permanent.
Fort Morgan and the quieter stretches of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach are popular with extended families and reunion groups who rent large houses together. If that's you, we're especially well-suited to your session.
Large properties often have wide private beach access and plenty of room for a big group. We're experienced photographing extended families of 20, 30, 40 people — working efficiently through the full group, all the subgroup combinations, and the candid moments in between. For large groups, we typically recommend scheduling 90 minutes to two hours.
The "we come to you" model is especially valuable for large groups: getting 30 people to a meeting point is a production. Having us show up at the house where everyone already is? Much simpler.
Shelley B Photography has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and on the cover of Pensacola Magazine five times. We've photographed families in beach houses and vacation rentals from Fort Morgan to Perdido Key, and we love every minute of it.
Tell us where you're staying, and we'll take care of everything else.
Got questions? We're here to chat.
