Portrait Photography Blog | Melody Smith Portrait, Petersburg VA

About a year ago, I began experimenting with a new style of portrait photography I eventually named Embodied Portraits. The idea came to me during my own struggle with being seen, with self confidence, and with anxiety that never seemed to let up. I spend my days as a constant scanner of expressions, body language, and how people take up space. But like most of my clients, my inner critic is loud, and I often spend more time in my head than actually in my body.

Caroline drove in from Richmond for her session at Melody Smith Portrait in Petersburg, and admitted something a lot of women feel but rarely say out loud. Her inner critic is loud, harsh, and almost impossible to quiet. She wasn't sure the camera would see anything different. During the early part of the session, Caroline was in her head, thinking about how she should look, catching every angle she was sure was wrong. So we stopped.

Some sessions have a clear reason behind them. A birthday, a new job, a milestone someone wants to mark. Noelle's reason was a little bigger than most. She's an actor, an artist, a storyteller. She grew up and studied in Richmond, Virginia. And she is heading to New York City. Before she left, she wanted portraits. Not just any portraits, but images that actually show who she is right now, at this exact moment, before the city gets a hold of her and the next version of hersel

There's a particular kind of urgency that shows up when a parent realizes their child is almost gone. Not gone, exactly, but shifting. Moving into something new, something that belongs to them now, not to the family home or the school hallways or the version of themselves that still lives in the childhood photos on the wall.

Laans has spent his career at the intersection of IT infrastructure, cybersecurity, AI, and governance. He's the kind of person who holds CISM, MCSE, and ITIL certifications, someone who has built and led complex systems for a long time. And he had reached a point where the systems he was most interested in building were his own.

Some clients book a session on a whim. Phoebe was not one of them. She had been watching from the sidelines for over a decade, ever since her mother sat in front of my camera and came home with portraits that stopped everyone in their tracks. Phoebe was just a kid then, maybe seven or eight years old, but she remembered. And somewhere in the back of her mind, she filed it away: someday, that's going to be me. Years later, now a young woman finishing up her studies in Richmond