Intro: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Posers podcast, the place where we skip the fluff. Say the quiet parts out loud and dig into what really matters. This is where photography, psychology, and business collide. I'm Jody, your host, and I'm bringing you my raw takes, hard wins, and a whole lot of unfiltered honesty about what it takes to build a photography business that actually connects and makes money.
So ladies, grab your headphones and get your tits up and your ears open because we are going to build something really incredible together.
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Posers podcast. Uh, this one is gonna hit a little bit different, think of it less like a business conversation and more like a love letter from me to you.
One. Photographers soft heart to another. I know that I don't show my softer side all that much, [00:01:00] but during this episode, I am cozied up in bed after a shoot that just kind of left me. Floating and walking on Cloud nine. And I just wanted to invite you into this moment a little bit with me. There's no notes, there's no outline, there's no lesson, there's no big strategy breakdown.
It's just me speaking a little bit softer from my heart about why we do this work and what it really means when all of it just feels like. It clicks. So maybe close your laptop, maybe stop editing for a second. Pull over park if you're in your car. And maybe just close your eyes and just take a minute and try to be in this moment with me.
And remember that what we are creating is actually really meaningful and really [00:02:00] impactful and we. Are genuinely having moments with our clients where we're changing how they look at things or how they enjoy their family or the moments that they get to have before their kids are all grown and leaving the house, or I don't know any of the other number of ways that we are so powerful and so impactful in our clients' lives.
So I hope you enjoy a little softer episode from me to you. Hello, my beautiful posers. I actually just crawled into bed. Here at my Airbnb in New Jersey, I am fresh outta the shower because shooting on the beach is something that I am not used to. And clearly I had to wash every grain of sand off of my whole entire body. But honestly, I've just slipped into my sweats and I pulled the blankets up around me and.
I'm so cozy, [00:03:00] but instead of just letting this night like drift away, I wanted to grab my phone, which if this audio is horrible, I am sorry I'm not hooked up to any sort of podcast like tech, anything and not, not a microphone in sight. Okay? I'm literally just laying here like cozy in my bed talking into my phone because.
Instead of letting this night get away from me, I just wanted to talk about something that is kind of exploding out of my chest because I just finished one of those like really rare shoots where everything aligns and. I'm sure you know exactly what I mean. I call it the trifecta, even though I know there are more than three elements at play.
But it's like whenever the light is just absolutely perfect and [00:04:00] wardrobe is flawless and everybody is in a good mood and kids are interacting and, and dads are happy and like just. Everything in the stars aligns in order for you to have just like an incredible shoot. Tonight was exactly that. Last night's shoot was, all of those things could have been aligned, but we didn't have the weather, right?
The weather was really working against me yesterday, but tonight, every star in the sky seemed too. Show up for me. I was photographing two teenage boys, which obviously is an age where most moms would say that it feels impossible to get them engaged, let alone actually enjoy themselves in front of a camera.
We had the family of four. They had two teenage boys, so I [00:05:00] wasn't just shooting the boys, I was shooting the whole entire family. But, uh, tonight the boys really leaned in and they laughed and they participated and they let me capture the kind of images that their mom is. Just going to be over the moon for like, not just tonight, not whenever she sees them in the reveal.
Not five years from now, not 10 years from now, but forever. She is, I just know that what we created for her tonight was an absolute like miracle for her because, whenever the shoot wrapped, she actually looked at me with tears in her eyes and she said, you're the only person who's ever gotten them to do that.
And I was like, really? Oh my God. And she was like, yeah, no other photographer has ever even come close to what you just made happen. And in [00:06:00] that moment I just, I felt so much gratitude for. What I do and why I do it, and honestly like why I teach the posing method the way that I do, because Mind you, this mom has had, she's a photographer too, so she's had tons of photo shoots and she's gone to the links to fly me from my home in Nevada all the way across the country into New Jersey.
And it just really reminds me how. Impactful and how important it is to really make people feel so incredibly comfortable in front of your camera. Because posing is really never about like contorting a body into a flattering angle like. Yes, I do that [00:07:00] too. Obviously, like once I have everybody set into like a set pose that we are going to do, obviously I'm going to say like, pull a leg up, move an arm here, do this, do that, whatever.
But it's about the psychology. First, it's about everything that happens before you're asking them to move the angles of their body that way, because it's about really knowing how to disarm people and to get them so comfortable. And you hear me talk about it all the time, to be able to drop the dopamine and drop the oxytocin, right, to create trust so quickly that even the most resistant people usually being the teenagers and the dads really soften.
Into it and it's really about like that connection before composition. But I don't know what I wanted to, the thing that's hitting me so hard is that like doing [00:08:00] this. Isn't so much just for, oh, okay, great. I'm gonna get a great photo. I'm gonna capture this, and then obviously they're gonna frame it or they're gonna put it in an album and I'm gonna make a lot of money and like this and that.
As much as we talk about like business and money and growth on this podcast, this is the piece that makes it all actually like matter, right? Obviously I wanna make money, obviously I want my business to grow. But without this piece of the puzzle, it just doesn't feel as fulfilling, I think is what I'm trying to say.
The fact that. This mom gets to walk away with photos of her teenage boys fully present with her. That's the priceless part. That's where we get to add so much value to where we can actually charge the number that we wanna charge, because without us being able to do [00:09:00] that, the other part falls flat. So. I don't know.
I'm just really overwhelmed with gratitude. Like not only for this work, not only for these families, but like for almost gratitude for myself in the fact that I've built the business that I absolutely love and I can do it in such a great way that I can also make money at it too. And it just feels like after shoots like this, it just feels like.
So much deeper than it does any other time. And listen, I'm not intending for this to be like a sales drop here, but the posing method is literally what I've used for 17 years in my business. It's the reason that I can walk into a shoot with teenage boys and walk out with a mom. In [00:10:00] tears, and it's the reason why my clients trust me, and it's the reason why I can have as much impact inside of their families as I can.
So I don't know, I'm just, I. I'm, I'm sitting here a little I'm a little emo. Okay.
Anyways I wasn't even planning on hopping on to like record this for you, so I don't have any sort of. I don't know anything. There's no notes in front of me to jump off of this recording in any kind of way, so I'm just gonna end it by saying that I absolutely love what I do, and I hope that you have, especially this coming up this fall, I hope that there are a handful of these kind of shoots built into your fall schedule that are [00:11:00] just going to be.
Reminders of what it is that we do and how impactful it is and how powerful it can be, and that this is why we create work that has so much value and so much worth to it. So I will, I guess, see you guys in the next episode. Bye for now. Friends.
Outro: Okay, so that is a wrap on this episode of the Posers Podcast. If you loved it, please subscribe, rate, and review because honestly, algorithms are needier than all of our ex-boyfriends combined. And ladies, I need all the help I can get. If you've got thoughts, questions, love letters, even hate mail, please send them my way.
I actually read every single one of them. So until next time, stapled, stay messy and don't let the bullshit win. Tits up. Ears open and go build something. Incredible. Bye for now, friends.
