What a Goddess Session Actually Feels Like

I get asked what happens during a session more than almost anything else, and I understand why.

Most of us have never done anything like this, and the not knowing is its own kind of nervousness. So I want to walk you through a day, the way it actually unfolds, from the moment you park your car to the moment you hike back out.

Before we ever meet in the woods

By the time your session day arrives, we already know each other in a real way. We have had our consultation. You have told me your story through the questionnaire, which asks about far more than sizing and logistics, because I want to photograph you as a whole person rather than a body in front of a lens. We have talked through your mood board, your hopes, your nerves, the parts of yourself you are ready to see. You are not walking into the woods with a stranger who happens to be holding a camera. You are meeting someone who has already been thinking about you.

The week of your session you receive a guide with all the practical details. What to wear beforehand so there are no marks on your skin. What to bring, from a robe to a favorite piece of jewelry to a playlist that makes you feel alive. Where to park, where to meet me, what shoes to wear for the walk in. Everything you might otherwise lie awake wondering about.

The walk in

If you have added hair and makeup, your morning begins there, easing into the day while someone tends to you. If you have not, we meet at the location and walk in together.

That walk is one of my favorite parts of the whole day, and it is the part nobody expects to matter. It gives us a few quiet minutes to land. We talk, or we do not. The trail does something to your nervous system that no amount of reassurance can do. By the time we reach the spot, you are already breathing differently.

Setting up, slowly

Once we arrive, I start getting my cameras ready. Shooting on medium format film takes a minute. Loading it is not instant and I never rush it, and that turns out to be a gift for both of us, because while I am working, the day is already beginning.

Music is playing by then. You might have a glass of something delicious in your hand. We stretch a little, we laugh, sometimes we dance around. The whole point is for you to feel loose and playful and in your body before a single frame is made. I have never once regretted the extra fifteen minutes this takes.

Following the light

When we begin photographing, the light leads. I am always watching how it moves through the trees, across the water, along your skin, which means we shift and wander and explore different pockets of our location as the afternoon goes on. It is active and fluid and alive, more like a hike with a camera than a photoshoot.

I offer gentle direction so you never feel unsure of what to do with your hands or your weight, and there is also plenty of room for you to simply move and let me follow. Both things are true at once.

I should tell you that I am a very enthusiastic cheerleader. You will hear me squeal. You will hear oh my God and I cannot get over how beautiful you look, and I mean every word of it, because watching a woman step into herself is genuinely one of the great pleasures of my life. That energy builds between us. It becomes contagious.

The pauses

A Goddess Session runs through eight rolls of film, which means we stop to reload more than a few times, and those pauses turn out to be some of the sweetest parts of the day. We change fabrics. We adjust wardrobe. We weave flowers into your hair, or hold them as a bouquet, or place them behind you so the background softens into color. We sip something. We talk. We reset.

Nobody plans for the breaks to be the good part. They always are.

The walk back out

By the time we pack up and hike out, you usually feel different. Grounded and lit up at the same time. A little wild and a little peaceful. Women often tell me the hours disappeared, which is exactly what I am after, because it means you stopped performing somewhere in the middle and simply stayed.

And then, weeks later

Your film goes to the lab and we wait. That waiting is part of it too. There is no reviewing images on a screen at the end of the day, no immediate reassurance, just the two of us trusting what happened out there.

When your gallery arrives you receive forty to sixty images, a cinematic slideshow of your day set to music so you can experience it as a story rather than a series of frames, and ten Polaroids in a handcrafted wooden box. Small, imperfect, entirely one of a kind. Little relics of who you were in that light.

Goddess Sessions run two to three hours and begin at $2,500. I photograph in Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and throughout the Triangle, in locations I have been scouting and returning to for years.

If any part of this made something in you lean forward, that is worth paying attention to.