A few years ago, Rochelle Einsiedel began posting photos of her family—her partner and two children—on Facebook, a hobby that most mothers do for little more than a like or two. Among the comments, though, one question kept coming up: Who is your photographer? To many’s surprise, Einsiedel herself was the one behind the lens.
This discovery brought about a deluge of requests from friends and family to take their photos in and around Milwaukee, where she’s from. One family friend insisted that Einsiedel shoot her event, offering to pay her for the gig even though Einsiedel said she’d do it for free.
“She posted it [and] my inbox was filled with clients,” she recalled. “I did it another time, and it was fun. After that, bigger clients started to reach out to me.” Before she knew it, Einsiedel was a professional photographer with a company named OH Snap! By Shell. Not long after, she landed a gig with the city’s social services organization Sojourner Truth.
Though she’d never thought to monetize it before her business’ start in 2021, Einsiedel says photography has been a passion since she was a child. Visiting her mother’s family in Mississippi, Einsiedel would wander through big family gatherings with a camera in hand.
“Even as a kid, I saw everything through that viewfinder,” she explained. “It was cool to me because it was like a moment that will always be history. You can never get that back.”
Despite her natural talent, far more has gone into building OH Snap! By Shell than meets the eye—literally and figuratively. Having worked as a bartender and correctional officer in previous careers, Einsiedel knew that she needed to sharpen her entrepreneurial skills in order to make her creative company a success.
“I wanted people to respect me as a well known name,” Einsiedel explained.
She enrolled herself in the African American Chamber of Commerce’s RISE MKE, a minority business accelerator program. “It gave me the knowledge of knowing my target audience and I absolutely love that class,” she said. “I actually won first place in their pitch competition and that kind of got me recognized a little bit more in the community.”
After three years of running OH Snap! By Shell as a side business, Einsiedel took the leap in 2024 to pursue photography full time. As a mother of two, she appreciates the flexibility that working for herself affords her, but also notes that being your own boss is “harder than working for someone else.”
“It’s actually harder working for yourself than someone else, because you have to be everything,” she explained. “Yeah, you’re good at your creative mind, but you also have to learn to be an accountant. You have to be your own marketing. You have to learn to delegate. You have to be consistent.”
While Einsiedel has only been photographing professionally for three years, it’s been a wildly eventful time: Not only has she traveled to South Africa to photograph a friend’s wedding, but she’s also spent time photographing White House official Isabel Guzman, and was the official photographer for the inauguration of Christy L. Brown, JD, Alverno College’s first Black president.
“Me having that camera is what got me to those places,” she emphasized.
Though her photography has led her to document historic and larger-than-life moments, Einsiedel’s passion remains in the magical potential of everyday candid photography.
“I love catching [people] where they’re not focused on the camera,” she said. “I didn’t know for the longest time what my genre of photography [was], and everyone just kept [telling] me, you’re a storyteller.”
Einsiedel has built up a repertoire of corporate clients—including Mortenson, Brew City Match, and Historic King Drive Bid—for whom she provides marketing and branding services such as group shots, press release photos, and event coverage.
For Einsiedel, it’s not just about capturing an event’s happenings, but enticing people to want to be there the next time around. “I’ve even had a company tell me, ‘The party wasn’t even that great, but your pictures made it look so much better.’” she explained with a laugh. “Everyone’s like, ‘Dang, I shouldn’t have missed it.’”
And while her artistic eye has been key to propeling OH Snap! By Shell into the limelight, Einsiedel knows that the other half of it has to do with what she herself has to offer to her clients.
“I think that what makes me different from my competition is I have Southern hospitality,” she explained.
Her intersecting identities have also made her approach to photography unique, in a way that looks out for the people she’s photographing, too.
“Being a woman photographer, we pay attention a little more to detail,” Einsiedel explained. “And being an African American woman, I do notice [how] Black women don’t want you taking a picture of them with a drink in their hand at their event. So just knowing the cultural things [of] how they want to be presented and not presented.”
Right now, OH Snap! By Shell is in a place where it is constantly “growing and thriving,” and Einsiedel wants to be able to pay this success forward.
“This business has taken me well past what I thought it would,” she said. “And there are so many resources in the state of Wisconsin. Once you get down and do the networking and figure it out, [there’s] so much out here that can help us.”
This fall, Einsedel plans to host classes in her newly-opened studio in Milwaukee, where she’ll be providing headshots, workshops on capability statements, certifications, and more.
“I want everyone to figure it out, because it’s hard and you cannot do it alone,” she said. “Unfortunately, people gatekeep, and I don’t gatekeep because I feel like what’s for me is going to be for me, and what’s for them is for them. So we can all win together, right?”
