Meet Shelley Vandegrift

Shelley Vandegrift is a digital artist, photographer, and educator whose work deliberately disrupts reality — transforming familiar scenes into something unexpected, otherworldly, and deeply personal. Her imagery spans digital infrared, expressive composites, and painterly interpretations of the world, always pushing the boundaries of what photography can be.

Her love of photography began in childhood and grew into a lifelong exploration of light, texture, mood, and technical artistry. That spirit of exploration never stops: Shelley is constantly experimenting with new techniques in Photoshop, Lightroom, and mobile editing apps, always giving herself permission to play, challenge assumptions, and see the world differently.

In 2020, Shelley co-authored Infrared Photography: Digital Techniques for Artistic Images (Amherst Media) with her artistic mentor and longtime teaching partner Laurie Klein. Together, as the Invisible Story Team, they spent a decade teaching digital infrared photography and post-processing to photographers around the world.

As an educator, Shelley brings that same sense of discovery into the classroom. She leads workshops and online courses for Santa Fe Workshops, Maine Media Workshops, the LA Center of Photography, and Camversations UK — helping photographers at every level use digital tools to bring their unique visions to life.

Her most recent workshops focus on expressive digital processing, guiding participants to move beyond documentation and into interpretation — using their images as a starting point for something that feels truer than reality itself. Whether exploring infrared landscapes, imaginative composites, or pure abstraction, Shelley believes photography is about more than capturing a scene. It's about disrupting what we think we see, and creating a view of the world that couldn't exist any other way.