Alma Verna Shelton Gray was born to Clarence and Rose Martin Shelton on October 6, 1905, five miles outside of Richland, Oregon on the ranch where she and her sister Ethel were raised. The Shelton family moved to La Grande, Oregon when Alma was a teenager and she graduated from the St. Francis Convent in La Grande in 1924. She then attended the Photographers of America School of Photography in Winona Lake, Indiana and the New York Institute of Photography.

After graduation she returned to the West Coast and began an apprenticeship at a photography studio in Olympia, Washington. They moved to Walla Walla in 1929, where she began working for E.H. Eggers at the Vitart Studio. She bought the business in 1930 and continued to run the studio until retirement in 1986.

During her career she was a 60-year member of the Altrusa Club, the Walla Walla Area Chamber of Commerce Award of Merit winner in 1963, the winner many state and national photography awards, achieved the title of Master Photographer, and became the first female president of the Professional Photographers of Walla Walla. She was also the first woman member, and the first woman president, of the the American Society of Photographers Inc., and a member of Professional Photographers of America. In her spare time she volunteered in projects aiding inmates at the Washington State Penitentiary, and also acted as a photographer for the Walla Walla Police Department, shooting photographs of accidents and crime scenes. Early in her career, she also worked part time for the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin newspaper, where she met Claude Gray. The couple married in 1948.