One of the things I am most proud of at a Liberty shoot isn’t actually the photographs themselves, even though I adore the images we create and the way women see themselves in a completely new light; what I am most proud of is that we create a very particular feeling inside the body – a feeling of safety, of possibility, of being allowed to slip into the next version of yourself without having to justify it, earn it, or explain it to anyone.
We do this very intentionally.
When we pose you, we’re not just thinking about what will look most flattering or what will work best in a frame; we are also thinking about how your body responds, how your nervous system relaxes, how your chemistry shifts. We use poses that help lower cortisol, your stress hormone, and increase testosterone, the hormone that, in women, is deeply linked with confidence, risk-taking and expression. When I talk about a “risky” woman, I don’t mean someone who is reckless or chaotic; I mean a woman who dares to show her personality, who dares to show the world her magic, who lets her jewels spill out instead of keeping them locked up, and who feels comfortable being fully herself in a society that has spent decades, if not centuries, telling her she is too loud, too emotional, too much, and simultaneously somehow never quite enough.
We live in a world in which marketing and media have been carefully constructed to whisper, and sometimes scream, that we are not worthy unless we buy the product, fit the mould, squeeze into the jeans, wear the dress, follow the trend; in that kind of world, a woman with low cortisol and high testosterone – a woman who is unapologetically herself, who is not frightened of taking up space, who expresses her full self – is a radical presence. That is the version of you I want to meet at every shoot: the one who is already inside you, waiting for someone to say, “It is safe now. You can come out.”
When women message me before a shoot, they often say things like, “I wish I had the confidence to do this, but I don’t,” or, “I could never do that, I’d be too embarrassed.” Those sentences, “I could never,” are always a tell. When someone says “never” to me in that context, I know they are standing right on the edge of something they desperately want and deeply need. The women who are adamant they could never do a Liberty shoot are often the ones who need it the most, and the ones for whom it will have the biggest impact.
What breaks my heart a little, and motivates me a lot, is that most women believe it is their job to become confident before they arrive. They think they must somehow earn the right to be photographed, that they must lose weight or gain muscle, diet for three days, perfect their wardrobe, fix everything they think is “wrong” with them, and only then step onto the set. But it is never your job to be confident; it is only your job to show up.
Showing up for yourself is confronting because so many women have lived lives where others haven’t shown up for them – absent parents, distant partners, unreliable friends – and yet, without realising it, they do the same thing to themselves; they abandon their own desires, cancel on themselves, postpone their own pleasure and then feel deeply triggered when someone else doesn’t prioritise them. Very often, that trigger is simply a mirror, reflecting the ways they don’t show up for their own hearts.
At a Liberty shoot, you do not need to lose weight, gain weight, tone up, slim down, starve, cleanse, or arrive with a Pinterest-perfect wardrobe. You might bring lots of outfits because it makes you feel more prepared, but the truth is that the only essential requirement is that you walk through the door. The rest – you feeling good, you looking good, you feeling held and guided – is my job, and after twelve years of doing this work and photographing thousands of women, there is not a single part of me that doubts my ability to bring that out of you.
The reason the feeling matters so much is because I am obsessed with manifesting, not just as a concept but as a lived experience. We like to think that manifesting is mostly about saying what we want out loud, writing it down, creating vision boards, sending off little wishes into the universe, and although that is a beautiful part of it, it is not the core of it. You do not attract what you say you want; you attract what you feel you can have.
So if, in the span of a two-hour shoot, I can help you feel in your body what you’ve been longing to feel in your life – powerful, confident, sensual, free, expansive, playful, unbothered by time, responsibility, or expectation – then I know I have done something that will stay with you far beyond that day. Once that feeling has been created in your nervous system, it lives there as a memory you can revisit. You can recall the way the wind felt on your skin, the way your chest opened when you threw your arms back, the way your laughter felt when it burst out of you without being suppressed, the way your body felt when you stopped thinking about it as an object to criticise and started experiencing it as a vessel for joy and movement and pleasure.
You can close your eyes months later and remember what it felt like to have your breasts to the fucking wind and not care, to not check your phone for two hours, to completely forget what time it was or where you had to be next. That sense of freedom – that I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-anything-but-this-moment freedom – sits behind so many manifestations.
Every desire you have is powered by one of two emotional engines: freedom or control. When we are creating from freedom, we are trusting, open, responsive, and rooted in the belief that we are supported; when we are creating from control, we are often gripped by fear, scarcity, and the need to manage every outcome. Control energy can build things, but the structures it creates tend to crack over time; freedom energy, on the other hand, builds differently – it feels like expansion, like breathing out, like stepping onto a path that was always meant for you.
When you come to a Liberty shoot and we imprint the feeling of freedom into your body, and then you walk away with tangible evidence – the images themselves, the moments frozen in time – you are able to look at those photos and say, “I was already her. She isn’t some future fantasy version of me. She is me. I have been her all along.” That is how we become the next version of ourselves. We don’t create her from scratch; we reveal her.
I did an exercise recently based on the hedgehog concept – if you’re in business, look it up, it’s brilliant – and one of the questions was, “What can you be the best in the world at?” I know, without any pretending, that I cannot be the best technical photographer in the world. I don’t care enough about microscopic detail, minute perfection and pixel-level precision for that to be my path. I can be a good photographer, even a great one, but I will never be the person who obsesses over the tiniest technical element of an image. That’s just not how my brain or my creativity works.
Where I know I can be the best in the world is in how I make women feel and in how I capture them in that feeling. I am a dynamic photographer. I am a liberating photographer. I am someone who, without a shadow of a doubt, can help you feel the best you have ever felt in your body and then catch you in that moment of radiance. My job is to take anyone – regardless of how they arrive, how they identify, how they currently feel about their appearance – and photograph them in that range of eight to ten out of ten, that moment where they are fully alive.
I always say: I can go on the school run looking like a solid two, maybe because I’m tired, wearing something old, hair up, no effort whatsoever. I can also go looking like an eight, if I choose to; the difference between a “hot” woman and a “not hot” woman is so often simply that one of them has chosen to be hot that day. My job at a shoot is to help you choose that energy and then hold you there, long enough that your body can fully experience it and your brain can register it as real.
To do that, I bring you out of your head, out of your spiralling thoughts, out of your worries about time, expectation, family, work, and into your body, into the moment, into the simple truth that right now, nothing matters except this experience of freedom moving through you. When we achieve that, life after the shoot has a way of rearranging itself.
I’ve watched women leave Liberty and suddenly apply for jobs that they previously thought were “above” them, step into opportunities they’d talked themselves out of, launch projects they had been sitting on for months or years, leave relationships that no longer honour them, or step more fully into the ones that do. The external changes vary, but the internal shift is always the same: they believe in themselves a little more.
To change the course of your life, you don’t actually need a huge dramatic overhaul. It can be as small as a two-millimetre shift. Imagine the way your posture feels when your chin is tucked down – your body curls in on itself, your nervous system receives the message, “It is not safe, stay small.” Now lift your chin just a little – two millimetres, two centimetres at most – and feel what happens inside you. That slight lift sends a completely different message through your system: “I am safe. It is okay to be seen.” Small, almost imperceptible adjustments like that can completely change how you move through the world.
A Liberty shoot is essentially two hours of those internal shifts layered on top of each other, two hours of your body being told again and again, “You are safe. You are beautiful. You are allowed to exist fully.” Two hours of your nervous system being imprinted with a new story. When you later sit down for your viewing and see those photos, you are not just seeing images; you are seeing the highest version of yourself looking back at you, the version you perhaps believed was not available because of what you look like or because of the picture you held in your mind before the shoot.
This is the part that can feel a little painful, so I’ll hold your hand through it: when you see yourself clearly, when you see your power, your beauty, your presence, your energy, you run out of excuses. There are no excuses left to hide behind. No excuses not to go for the job. No excuses not to speak your truth. No excuses not to create the life you want. And yes, that is scary, because taking responsibility for your potential is always scary.
But isn’t it so much scarier to live a half-life than it is to risk living a full one? Isn’t it more heartbreaking to imagine yourself at the end of your life knowing you could have been more vibrant, more alive, more “you”, and chose to stay small, than it is to risk being seen now? To me, the thought of dimming yourself on purpose, of staying forever in the version of you that feels safe but numb, is far more terrifying than any leap into your fullest expression.
So here is what I want you to know: if you are standing on the edge of a decision and you want to see the next version of yourself, to feel her in your body, to have evidence of her in your hands, then book the shoot. Not because a photoshoot will magically fix your life, but because it will anchor a feeling in your nervous system that you can return to again and again – a feeling of already being her.
You are one decision – sometimes one tiny, two-millimetre decision – away from a completely different path. And when you decide, truly decide, that you have always been worthy, that you have always been enough, that you actually can do the thing you’re afraid of, the entire universe begins to quietly rearrange itself around that truth. I see it happen at every Liberty shoot; I see women choose themselves in a deeper way than they ever have before, and from that moment, whether they realise it or not, the trajectory of their life shifts.
You are not becoming someone else; you are becoming more yourself. And if you want to meet that next version of you, the one who is already inside, waiting and ready, then the invitation is simple: show up.
