Hi, I’m Michelle, but you can call me Shelby. I’m a documentary wedding photographer with 14 years of experience photographing hundreds of weddings. I was born and raised on the north side of Chicago. Chicago is where I learned to fall in love with stories, not the loud, obvious ones, but the quiet details that give everything meaning. The way light falls in a gangway, the character in an old home, a century-old door handle that’s been touched by those long gone who also had a lifetime of stories to tell. Maybe it’s a small crack in a stained glass window that has survived generations of the same family. The feeling a place holds long after people have passed through it. That same sense of wonder and appreciation is what I bring to every wedding day. I want to help tell your story with a sense of timeless nostalgia that will carry the day’s feelings for a lifetime to come.

A little about my own story, because it is important you know who your photographer is. My husband, best friend (and often my second shooter) Nick, and I met in 6th grade in Portage Park; we’ve been hanging out on an endless slumber party ever since. He’s a local one ironworker by day (because, let’s be honest, one of us needed to bring home the insurance, and it definitely wasn’t going to be the photographer afraid of heights). And he’s a maniac that has been climbing things since birth and now he’s found a way to get paid for it. We raised our children in the North Center neighborhood for over eleven years. Our children were lucky enough to have the lakefront, Lincoln Park Zoo, Oz Park, Welles Park and lincoln square as a backdrop for their childhood. We miss those days in the city but appreciate the space and quiet that comes with moving to the suburbs and having more pets than we should. if you need a "farm" fresh eggs plug you know who to call. When we’re not working, you’ll find us cooking up new recipes (because suburban food sucks), hosting family get-togethers, very competitive cooking competitions, or going back to wander the city we’ve always called home and cry about our babies not being babies anymore.

My perfect day would be spending an early morning at Berger Park daydreaming about what the neighborhood looked like in its glory days, listening to the lake talk with an over priced  coffee in hand that I didn’t make. Maybe an afternoon at Lincoln Park Zoo, or hunting for treasures at Salvage One, window shopping through Andersonville or exploring Open House Chicago's annual architectural tour. if im really getting wild maybe im at a lush cosmetics getting as much dopamine my system can handle from smelling evrything they have to offer.

No matter where we wind up, there is a 1,000% chance of us grabbing food from Roost (who cares if it causes a little Caucasian tummy ache), Smoke on Pulaski — best BBQ in the city — or tacos and fresh chips from Taqueria El Asadero on Montrose Ave. And if it’s pizza, if it’s not in a bag that’s now see-through from the grease, we don’t want it. Shoutout to LaVilla.

If you catch me in an antique shop smelling old books or holding more than I can carry dressed like Adam Sandler… no, you didn’t.