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Today I’m excited to share my reflections on my recent photo shoot experience.
Now, photoshoots bring up all sorts of internal dialogue, don’t they? Is it that pretentious poser kind of stuff that we’ve been been brought up with? Or is it actually a profound portal that could be used for good?
We’re going to explore that today. But before we begin, I’m currently making sure that my electric car is fully charged because I’m about to go away for a couple of days with my coach that I have been working with over the past year. And I am excited and also ready for the transformation that comes with bringing a course or a coaching journey to a close.
I find that my relationships with my coaches transform and change after they have finished, and I experience that as a coach myself. I’m somebody who uses coaching for 12 to 18 months, and then I have 6 to 12 months of integration time.
I really enjoy applying it in real life, seeing how I can use that old adage, “the way we do one thing is the way we do everything”, and figuring out what other areas in my life that I’d like to apply the learnings to. So, my electric car is being charged up and I’m about to go on an adventure, so I’m in an adventurous mood. Last week, my adventure was an internal one.
It was an adventure into the realms of my mind when I’m coming up to having a new photoshoot. As a business owner, it seems pretty standard to have a photoshoot every 12 to 24 months, especially if there’s a level of authenticity and a level of making sure that what you are projecting out there is matching what’s internally going on for yourself and your business.
I really value when business owners put up an image that represents truly who they are.
It represents an aligned version of who they are, so that when I meet them in real life, I go, “Oh yes, you look exactly like a picture. Oh, yes, I feel like I already know you!”. And for me as well, I want that for my clients and I want to meet them in real life and everybody experiences me as I am. There’s no weird expectations not being met or anything like that.
But my journey with photography and being in front of the camera started when I was really little, and I’m sure you’ve got a similar kind of story when it comes to your thoughts about getting your photo taken. It’s rare that us as humans really enjoy the element of being in front of the camera. My dad is a photographer by trade and has an Order of Australia Medal for his contribution to photography in Australia. So, I’m used to having my dad interact with me on the back end of a camera.
It’s one of his traits as to how he gets along with everybody at family occasions and things like that. Most of these moments have to be memorised. And I never used to like being in front of the camera, but I get the sense that a lot of people don’t like being in front of the camera, right? But in this day and age, where technology, social media and other places and spaces need you to be represented and known, liked and trusted through some medium, it’s important that our visual image and our visual representation comes through from a quality photo.
Why? Because that photo is likely to reach the potential people you’re here to help, the potential opportunities and collaborations, and it may even end up on the back of a pamphlet, a magazine, or even a book. It’s a really different experience internally, isn’t it? So, leading up to my most recent photoshoot last week, I was going through the mental checklist of, okay, what do I need to wear? What do I need to pack, how’s it going to work? How long is it going to take? All these logistical notions of what’s going to look good and what makeup should I wear, and all this kind of stuff.
Now, my experience of having photoshoots every two years for my business, and I’ve been in business about 16 years now, is that all of that stuff is important, but it’s not THE MOST important thing. The primary and secondary focus of any photo shoot is showing up and considering who you are engaging with these photos. You need to think about:
- Who’s on the other end of the lens?
- Who’s going to be seeing these images?
- What do you want them to feel?
- How do you want to feel?
- How do you want to show up for yourself?
- What do you personally want to learn through the experience?
And then the tertiary aim, obviously, is all of those logistical things. You need to think about:
- What else do you need to consider when it comes to the aesthetic? (e.g. the picture and how it’s formed)
- What you’re going to put into those pictures? (e.g. the props and colouring you’re going to use)
- How will it match your branding? (e.g. do you need a Pinterest board, that kind of thing!)
Consideration #1 – People and Feelings
For me, my most recent pictures, I really wanted to make sure that people get the sense of adventure. Because apart from it being my number one value and my number one way of making decisions, it is also a time in the global world, in the global vibe, that we are all wanting a bit more adventure.
We’re all needing sense of awe and wonder, back again after so many stalls, so many lockdowns, and so many other things that have happened the past couple of years. So, I want people to reignite that sense of adventure when they see it. I also wanted people to feel inspired, as usual, and I also wanted people to get the sense of a level of professionalism and invitation. As soon as I could engage with that, I could see down the viewfinder whenever I was looking at that camera. And guess what happened?
It didn’t become a camera. It became a person. It became one of my favourite clients. It became one of my favourite listeners. It became one of my favourite people that I want to go away on retreat with. I was looking down the camera as though I was talking and speaking and smiling and engaging with them.
Consideration #2 – Personal Benefits
Next, what did I want personally out of it? This is a consideration for you if you are upleveling and doing a little zhuzh of your branding or even if this is your first go at getting a headshot or a photo shoot, you really need to consider what you want to experience out of it. For me, it was engaging the camera.
A couple of photoshoots ago, I really wanted to embody my feminine, and I had an amazing experience doing that. My last photoshoot was more about lifestyle and how it feels to come and have a cup of tea with me and what it was like to move my body in ways that created a feeling of leisure and pleasure. Whereas this one definitely had to do with facing the camera, looking down the lens and engaging not the camera, but the potential people on the other end and my ideal person who I really wanted to engage with visually.
Consideration #3 – The How To’s
Here are my top three tips for the how to’s.
1. Get a Pinterest board.
You’ll start to notice that you will actually like certain pictures, and when you start to like a type of certain picture, there’ll be themes, there’ll be colourings, there’ll be style that is a pattern through those pictures. And when you share them with a photographer, because photographers are really visual people, they’ll be able to see it as well. So, part of that is making sure that you’ve got a Pinterest board or some type of visual representation of what you like. If you don’t know what you like, you could just go for what you don’t like, and it can give just as much information as to the style that you might be looking for.
2. Find clothes that make you feel amazing and create an environment that makes you feel amazing.
Why? Because it can be really awkward, very strange and very different in front of a camera. So, whatever you can do prior to the photoshoot, don’t be booking a whole bunch of clients or taking the kids to school or doing all those things. You want to feel amazing going into it. If you feel amazing in yourself and yourselves and you’re wearing clothes that feel really good, then you’re going to feel amazing going in.
I also learned this third tip off, my first video director. I had a video director for my first course because I wanted to go all out and go pro and do it all the best way first. I sold two of those courses. Anyway, that’s a story for another time. This video director gave me incredible advice, and I’ve heard it since from so many audiovisual peeps.
3. Cameras take away 10%!
Whether they’re video cameras, whether they’re cameras on your Zoom meeting, whether they’re cameras in a photoshoot. They take away 10%. And what that means is they take away 10% of your life force. You look slightly deader, which means you look slightly less alive. You need the extra 10% of makeup. You need to go the extra 10% and get your hair done or judged a little bit more than usual. You need to go the extra 10%. And if you don’t iron your clothes like I don’t, you need to iron your clothes for the day. And it’s that little extra 10% that can be captured by the camera and amplified. Whereas if you don’t do it, it’s just not there to be amplified. So go the extra 10%.
So lastly, I wanted to talk about the notion of it being a portal.
Portals appear everywhere in our lives. They’re internal, they’re external. If you talk to a shamanic practitioner, they might be talking about walking through Stonehenge or the stone circles in Avebury or even some of the extraordinary stone monoliths in the Inca and Andean traditions. These portals exist in real life because there’s places and spaces that were considered sacred and transformative to visit, to experience, and to move through in our personal lives and in our insides insights, we also have portals.
I know for certain the portal of giving birth was one of the most profound things that I have ever experienced and it was a portal. I went into that experience one person and I came out a different person. Many of my courses and retreats, the people that come in on the front end are very different to the people who leave. There’s a waterfall in Bali that we go to at the end of our Maverick Retreat every year and it’s a portal. The people who go in, who you are as you enter there and who you leave as you are changed as a person.
Some of the biggest things that we go through in our lives – death, divorce, diagnosis – these are portals as well. But it doesn’t have to be so profound and deep. Some portals just have you show up as somebody who you choose to be, who you’re choosing to turn into, who you’re choosing to uncover and unlayer who you already were, but you didn’t see it for yourself. And that’s what I feel a photoshoot is. It’s a representation of a time, a snapshot of a time when you have experienced whatever it is to get up to that moment and you are setting yourself up for an experience to come.
And in that, that’s a transition and a portal into somebody who you are choosing to move into be. It’s not just pretentious posing – although posing is part of it – there is a lot more layering and depth to a photoshoot than first meets the eye. I feel like for me this most recent one really encapsulated a time in my life. The past year that I had hidden challenges I wasn’t sure of, and they came to the surface, and I dealt with them last year around surgery and around other things. This is a representation of where I’m moving forward. The more adventures I want to create, the more connection, the more art, the more creativity I want to bring into my life, and the more fun and pleasure in business and ways in which I can invite you all in.
So I cannot wait to share my recent photos. The action I’d love for you to take is, if you haven’t taken a selfie in a while, if you haven’t appeared on your social media, and if you haven’t booked a photoshoot, my invitation is to do it as soon as possible. There’s so much depth and richness when you pay attention to what’s going on in a photo and how you can show up for that and what you can hear from your insides and what you can learn from yourself and your own wisdom.
If you had an experience today reading this, if you know somebody who might benefit from it, please share it.
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