Theiko Fos Studios Masters the Art of Love
February is touted as the month of love. But Michelle Shafer celebrates love 24/7, 365 days per year.
It is Michelle’s innate ability to love so deeply that enables her to create powerful award-winning imagery. Through Theiko Fos Studios, her wedding photography business, Michelle marries (pun intended!) her personal passion for love with capturing others’ love stories. What better wedding photographer than one that was born to love?
Through her photography, Michelle does more than freeze time for a moment. She tells a story, creating a memory that will last longer than a lifetime. She achieves this on a personal level by truly connecting with her couples. She doesn’t have traditional client relationships with her couples. She gets to know them, understand them, love them (of course!) – and ultimately provides them with what she refers to as the “Divine Experience.”
From a technical standpoint, Michelle uses mood and atmosphere and has mastered lighting to set apart her images. “I feel lighting is the true art I get to create to tell my couple’s love story within their photographs.” Hence the name of her business, Theiko Fos Studios (pronounced Thay-ko Fos) which is Greek for “Divine Light”.
Unlike others in the industry, Michelle didn’t dream of being a photographer from a young age. Rather, she was on a completely different track and stumbled into it. Or, perhaps photography fell in love with her?
More than a decade ago, Michelle had a successful tutu business. (Yes, making tutus for little girls.) To promote her handcrafted pieces, using her daughter as her model, she began taking photos and posting to social media.
Soon thereafter, customers were not only purchasing her tutus, they were hiring Michelle for photo sessions. Armed with a new professional camera (a birthday present from her hubby), Michelle - initially nervously - took on these requests.
After a few shoots, she found she simply couldn’t put the camera down. Her photography business quickly took off. She came to a crossroads and had to decide whether to continue making tutus (which she loved!) or to pursue this new hobby full force.
Just a month after her first session, she officially exchanged her needle and thread for her camera. She took classes, worked with a mentor and dove in head first to learn everything she could about photography. A couple years later, she was hired to shoot her first wedding.
And with that first wedding, her fate was sealed. “I will never forget that moment when I called my mentor after the wedding telling him "This is what I HAVE to do! I found my niche! I cannot live without doing weddings!,” she exclaimed. The feeling she had after doing that wedding was like nothing she had ever experienced and from that point on Michelle couldn’t see herself doing anything else.
But more than that, it was in that moment, that Michelle knew she wanted to be the best wedding photographer in the world. She wanted to be in magazines and be well known.
And that’s exactly what’s happened. Today, she is an internationally award winning wedding photographer. She is one of only 30 photographers who holds a Wedding Masters Degree of Photography. In 2019, she was named to the top 20 wedding photographers in the world. That same year she received the very prestigious Florida Professional Photographer Becker Award.
So, where will Michelle go from here? With deep roots in Greek heritage and with one of Michelle’s biggest inspirations is her Greek grandmother who came to the US in pursuit of the American Dream, shooting a wedding in Greece tops her list of goals.
In the meantime, the St. Augustine-based photographer continues to capture the love stories of locals, clients who have chosen the First Coast for their destination wedding as well as couples who tie the knot out of state and out of the country. To learn more about her award-winning photography and how you can have the Divine Experience, please visit theikofos.com.