Meet Yailin Benitez
Mama, photographer, and creative soul.
About the artist
I didn't stumble into photography — I grew into it. It started at 15 when my parents handed me a small digital camera and I pointed it at everything: animals, landscapes, the world as I saw it. By the time I wrote my senior thesis, I already knew. Photography wasn't a hobby. It was the plan.
I was born in Havana, Cuba, and came to South Florida at 10. I earned a degree in Psychology, worked at a bank, spent eight years at a world-renowned nonprofit — and through all of it, I kept shooting. Not professionally. Not yet. But consistently, intentionally, with a hunger I couldn't explain and didn't need to.
When my husband gifted me my first professional camera at 23, something clicked that went beyond the shutter. My sister had become a professional ballerina and contortionist, and I became her photographer. That partnership took us places — magazine features, dance campaigns, brand collaborations across the country. It taught me how to read a person before they've even posed. How to find the angle they didn't know they had. How to make someone feel completely at ease in front of a lens. Those years were my real education, and they shaped everything I do today.
When my son Jordan was born in 2018, my focus shifted in the best possible way. Suddenly I was photographing the smallest, most fleeting moments — a first smile, a tiny hand, a look that lasts half a second and disappears forever if you're not ready. I understood on a completely different level why this work matters. Not just as art, but as memory. As something you hold onto. Family photography stopped being a category and became a calling.
By 2020, COVID had changed everything. I was working remotely, booking more clients, taking courses, studying light and composition with the kind of focus I'd never had time for before. What started as uncertainty became the clearest stretch of professional growth I'd ever experienced. I came out of it knowing exactly what I wanted to build.
In September 2021, I quietly signed a lease on a space in Lake Worth and didn't tell anyone until it was done. My husband and I built the entire studio ourselves — every wall, every detail — with our own hands, our own time, and yes, actual tears and blood. It was the scariest thing I'd ever done. It was also the best.
YB Photography Studio is the result of every risk I was afraid to take and took anyway. And I would not change a single thing.
Read Yailin's full interview with Voyage Magazine here
Awards
The studio
Golden Strobe Creative Studio is home of Yailin Benitez Photography. You'll feel it immediately — this space was built with intention. At almost 1,500 square feet, it's fully equipped with professional lighting, a wide variety of props, and multiple sets ready to go. We have swings, pianos, flower arches, thrones, angel wings, children's furniture, adult furniture — and I'm always adding more. If you can imagine it, chances are we can build it.
We carry dress collections for maternity, Quinceañera, and little girls, so you don't have to stress about what to wear or bring. Every detail is thought through before you arrive.
The studio is private and by appointment only — when you're here, the doors close and my full attention is yours. No other clients. No distractions. Just us, the light, and your moment. I do the balloon sets and decorations myself. I guide your posing. For Quinceañera clients, I even offer posing classes before the big day so you walk in confident and ready. Every session starts with a pre-consultation because I want to know your vision before you ever step through the door.
And the editing — I take that just as seriously as the shoot itself. Clients receive all unedited images and personally select the ones they want edited. Every final image is finished to a high-end standard I'm genuinely proud of. We also offer fine art printing in-house: canvases, acrylics, metals, prints, and photo albums — because these images deserve to live somewhere beyond a phone screen.
Most of my clients come back. Many of them become friends. That tells me everything.