The photo and t-shirt studio on North Stemmons Freeway is the kind of place that seems too good to be true. The family-run shop in Suite 207 offers fair prices that haven’t budged since 2000 and is open only from Thursday to Saturday. And somehow, they’re still going strong. How does that work? For owner Dae Shin, who goes by Bobby, the answer is pretty simple. “I don’t need the money,” he says. “Just enough to pay the bills and for gas money.”
Shin and his wife, Hae Shin, both Korean immigrants, built Bobby’s Fast Photos and T-shirts Studio from the ground up. After graduating from UNT, Shin worked and saved all the money he could, then finally opened a photo lab in 1978 where he developed film and printed images. When that didn’t take off, Shin pivoted and found himself on the frontier of studio photography. He offered same day studio portraits in just three hours, at a time when that kind of turnaround was unheard of. Plus, he could screenprint anything on a t-shirt. Nearly five decades later, that straightforward model still holds.
Shin’s mindset is not typical of a small-business owner in 2026, but the photo studio has never been run with franchising or sky-high profits in mind. Shin’s focus, he says, is his customers, some of whom have been coming to his studio since its opening and now take their children and grandchildren to be photographed there, too. “We get a lot of people coming back,” Shin says proudly. Take one step inside, and you’ll understand why.
The studio feels suspended in another time, turn-of-the-millennium pricing included. Lining the walls are dozens of smiling faces in front of just as many colorful, funky backgrounds. Open a binder on a counter, and get lost in more than 200 backdrop options: laser beams, sparkles, airbrushed pink hearts, lush forests—something for any and every occasion. Bobby’s only takes walk-ins, and the lobby is often bustling with graduating seniors, new parents with their babies, and couples in coordinated outfits waiting for a turn in front of the simple, single-camera setup…