The Brief
he Chapin Foundation has supported the Myrtle Beach community for over 80 years — funding churches, the YMCA, public libraries, healthcare providers, and the local nonprofits that do the day-to-day work of keeping a community functioning. Founded in 1943 by Simeon B. Chapin, the foundation operates with a deep commitment to the specific place it serves.
The Brandon Agency, the foundation's marketing partner, brought us in to produce a library of on-location photography across Myrtle Beach — imagery that captured the actual community the foundation exists to support. Not stock-style beach photography, not generic civic imagery. The kind of photography that shows a place the way the people who live there see it.
The brief was specific in spirit but open in execution: spend time in Myrtle Beach, shoot the community honestly, and deliver imagery the foundation and the agency could use across web, print, annual reports, social, and grant communications.
The Approach
We approached the shoot the way a documentary photographer would approach a place they cared about — slowly, attentively, and with an eye for the specific over the generic. The goal wasn't to make Myrtle Beach look like a brochure. It was to make it look like itself.
Locations were chosen to reflect the breadth of what the foundation supports — community spaces, neighborhood landmarks, the everyday architecture and texture of the city. Light was timed for early morning and late afternoon to give the imagery warmth and dimension without leaning into golden-hour clichés. People appeared where they made sense, never staged or "lifestyled" in a way that would have read as marketing rather than community.
Final imagery was delivered in a mix of orientations and crop ratios — wide-format for web heroes and print, vertical for digital and social, square for feed — giving The Brandon Agency a flexible asset library to deploy across the foundation's full marketing program.
Community, Nonprofit & Agency-Produced Photography
We work with nonprofits, foundations, civic organizations, and the agencies that serve them to produce photography that captures community honestly. The visual language for this kind of work is different from product or brand photography — it has to feel real, place-specific, and respectful of the people and communities it represents.
We also regularly produce work as a subcontracted production partner for marketing and creative agencies across the Southeast. If you're an agency looking for a reliable production partner for a campaign, or a nonprofit working on a community storytelling project, we'd love to talk.