People assume women book portrait sessions from a place of confidence. That they're celebrating something. That they already feel good about themselves and want it on record.
In my 8 years of work as a women's portrait photographer in New Zealand, more than a thousand women, I can tell you that's almost never how it goes.
The women who actually book
The women who come to Raglan for a Goddess Shoot® are usually in the middle of something. A relationship that ended. A decade that passed. A season of becoming someone's mother and losing track of who they were before that. A version of themselves they can barely remember.
They don't book because they feel ready. They book because they're exhausted from waiting to feel ready.
There's a difference, and it matters.
The moments that bring women to Raglan
A woman turns 40 and realises she hasn't had a photo taken of herself, really taken, intentionally, of her, in years. Another comes out of a long relationship and wants to see who she is on her own. One books because she's been through treatment and she's on the other side and she wants to mark that. Another can't tell you why, exactly. Just that something said now. So she came.
These aren't dramatic transformations. They're ordinary moments of reckoning. And they're the moments where portrait photography, real portrait photography, done outdoors in the landscape of Raglan, with someone who knows how to see you, can give something back.
What photography actually does
I had a client last year who told me she hadn't looked directly at a camera in eleven years. She always turned away, or moved behind someone else, or found a reason to not be in the shot. She came to Raglan because her daughter asked her to.
At the end of the session, she stood on the black sand and looked at the images on the back of my camera. She was quiet for a long time.
Then she said: I forgot that I was someone (I still get teary thinking of this)
That's what portrait photography can do. Not make you look thinner or younger or more glamorous. Give you back the evidence that you exist. That you are, right now, in this landscape, someone worth seeing.
Who the Goddess Shoot is really for
It's not for women who already feel great. It's for women who are trying to remember what that feels like.
We shoot outdoors in Raglan, on the coast, in the bush, in the natural light that this west coast landscape is known for. Being outside, in real air, in a real place, does something that four walls and artificial light can't. Women move differently. They breathe differently. Something about the landscape of Raglan gives them permission to exist without performing.
That's what I'm creating space for. Not a photoshoot. A remembering.
If you recognised yourself anywhere in this — this is for you.
You can book your Goddess Shoot® in Raglan here, or read about what's included before you decide.
