The People Behind the Camera in their Own Words
Chris: Heidi’s been in front of my camera twice in the two years we’ve run this studio together. I don’t talk about it much. It’s hers to talk about, not mine.
Heidi: I’ll talk about it. I help run this business. I’m in the room for every session we shoot. And I still walked into my own first session nervous.
Chris: That surprised me less than you’d think.
Heidi: It surprised me. I spend most of my time helping other women feel steady in that chair. I didn’t expect to need the same thing myself.
Chris: Nerves don’t check your job title before they show up. What I noticed, watching someone I know that well go through it, is that the nerves didn’t need fixing. They needed room.
Heidi: He didn’t rush me toward the shot. Didn’t need a performance before I was ready to give one. Somewhere in the middle of that first session, I stopped thinking about the camera and just let it happen.
Chris: By the end she wasn’t performing anymore. She was just there.
Heidi: I don’t think I’d ever felt that confident. Then I saw the photos, and it went further than confident. I looked at the images and believed something about myself I usually only hear from other people.
Chris: She came back a year later and asked for more.
Heidi: Bolder choices. Further than I’d gone the first time.
Chris: My job didn’t change. Follow where she wants to go. Check in the whole way. Comfort doesn’t get quietly traded for a better angle, not for her, not for anyone who sits in that chair.
Heidi: I still have a few of those photos saved on my phone. On the days I feel low, or invisible the way a lot of women describe feeling, the ones nobody else notices because I’m too busy holding everything together, I pull them up. The version of myself in those photos is still there. I just needed the reminder.
Chris: That’s the whole model. Not something we built for clients and don’t believe ourselves.
Heidi: It’s the same thing happening in this house, between the two of us, that happens for every woman who sits in front of that camera. I understand it from both sides now. That’s not something I could have told a client with the same weight before I sat in that chair myself.
Chris: I don’t ask anyone to trust a process I haven’t watched work on someone I love.
— Chris & Heidi
