People ask me this more than they ask about packages or pricing.
What actually happens on a shoot day? What do you do before we get there? What does it feel like from your side of the camera?
So here it is. A real day, behind the lens, written by me held in Raglan, New Zealand.
Before anyone arrives
I'm on location early. Always. And often even the day before just to make sure the location is perfect.
The light in Raglan in the morning — especially on a west coast morning when the sky is clear and the Tasman ocean is doing something, is unlike anywhere else in the world I've shot. I walk the beach. I check the tide. I watch where the shadows are falling and where they'll be in an hour I also often tidy up drift wood that would bother me in photos haha.
The session hasn't started yet but the work already has. I'm reading the landscape, making decisions about where to place a woman so the light finds her in a way that's both beautiful and true.
By the time the first client arrives, I already know where we're going.
She arrives nervous
They almost always do, it's not like doing a photoshoot is something we do everyday hey?
There's a specific kind of energy in a woman who has driven to Raglan for a portrait session — part excitement, part terror, part something she can't name yet. She's done something brave just by showing up. She doesn't always know that yet.
I don't go straight to the camera. We walk. I talk to her about the drive in, about the light, about the landscape around us. About anything except the shoot. This always helps calm her nerves.
By the time we reach the location I've chosen — the stretch of black sand, the bush track, wherever the morning has decided we should be — something in her has already started to settle. The coast does that. The air. The fact of being somewhere wild and beautiful, away from everything ordinary, the busy city or even just the family.
The moment it changes
It's different for every woman. But it always happens.
Usually around fifteen minutes in. She stops thinking about what she looks like and starts actually being somewhere. On the black sand. In the wind. In the light coming off the Tasman. Her face opens. Her body stops holding itself.
That's the shot. That's the image she'll look at in ten years from now and every time it fills me with a moment of : awww this is why I do this.
My job is to build the conditions for that moment — and to be completely ready when it arrives. Sometimes it lasts thirty seconds. Sometimes it lasts the rest of the session. I never know. I just stay ready.
What I'm doing while you think I'm just taking photos
Watching the light. Tracking where the cloud is. Reading the landscape for the next frame before this one is finished.
Watching her face, not the camera. The image I'm after lives in a specific expression, a specific quality of presence, that appears and disappears in seconds. I'm not composing. I'm waiting and then I'm moving.
The best images from any Raglan session are almost never the posed ones. They're the laugh between setups. The moment she looked out at the ocean and forgot I was there. The wind doing something unexpected to her hair while I was still adjusting my settings.
Raglan keeps giving you things if you stay open to them.
The end of the day
By the time the last client drives away from Raglan, I'm tired in the way that feels earned.
Full, not depleted. This is the work I was made for — spending a day outdoors in one of the most beautiful places in New Zealand, holding space for women to see themselves.
I pack up the car as the afternoon light goes golden over the Tasman. The black sand is empty. The surf is still going (haha it always is in Raglan tbh)
Raglan at the end of a shoot day is one of my favourite things in the world, I drive home with my heart full of gratitude for this job.
If any part of this made you wonder what it would feel like to be on the other side of the camera — to be the woman arriving in Raglan, walking down to the black sand, stepping into something you weren't sure you were ready for — I'd love to have you.
Book your Raglan portrait session here.
