Women are drawn to Melody Smith’s studio in Petersburg, Virginia, for something special. Something she likes to call a “soul portrait.” Smith describes her clients as the 17-year-old whose mother wants her to see the woman she will become, the 40-year-old reclaiming her identity in the midst of a divorce, the 60-year-old who wants to leave something more compelling to her grandchildren than family snapshots.

“A lot of them have pretty intense pasts, and they’re coming to me because of a revelation, a self-actualization,” says Smith of her clients. “They’re realizing that it’s not selfish to take care of themselves, to celebrate who they are.”

Though she got her start photographing weddings, Smith has pared down her offerings to a specific style of portraiture. Her primary style is what she markets as Portrait Contemporary, a dramatic and clean approach with simple backgrounds. Her Portrait Couture line is more ethereal, each a one-of-a-kind dreamscape that’s moody, sometimes a little dark, and beautiful. These are a labor of love, as Smith painstakingly attends to every detail of the experience and the setting. She’ll spend hours gluing 300 dried roses to a headpiece or creating a fluttering whirlwind of vintage book pages and monofilament line. 

“My style is haunting and somber,” Smith says of her couture work. “I want to create something that looks like an old, timeless photograph that you just can’t place in a specific time.”

Inspiration sometimes strikes when she sees a client for the first time. There was the woman who booked a contemporary session, but when she walked through the door, Smith knew she was going to photograph a couture session. “I told her if you don’t love it, you don’t have to buy it, but as soon as I saw her, I knew,” she says.

When the woman saw the outfit Smith had selected, she gasped in disbelief because it matched the gold foil wallpaper and color scheme of the living room she was in the midst of redecorating. “Her portrait looks like the room was designed around it, but neither of us had any idea,” she says.

Call it kismet, luck, or just plain coincidence, but Smith says this is not uncommon.

“I have all these concepts just waiting and it happens like that,” she says. “Like the Dandelion Queen. This little girl was just spinning in place and saying she was the dandelion queen, and magic happened. She made it come to life.”

SAYING NO

Smith’s couture sessions require so much creative energy that she limits them, maintaining a waiting list of clients who are clamoring for a turn.

“It’s a lot of preparation, shopping, and sourcing, and I make everything myself,” she says. “I’ve learned to be more selective on the clients I choose to work with on concepts. We did 40 couture sessions one year, and I was so drained.”

Smith had to learn the art of saying no, meaning that she doesn’t take on everything that comes her way—a tactic she finds leads to fulfilling artistry for her. She doesn’t want to pursue a client concept she feels won’t stand the test of time. But when the right client walks through her door, her couture sessions are the stuff of dreams. (Literally, she often wakes in the night with an idea she scribbles down and saves for just the right woman.)

But getting to this place, where her couture sessions are in high demand, required another no—one that was a little harder to say. Smith began her business as a wedding photographer, drawn to the glamour and beauty of a day filled with feminine grandiosity. But after photographing 300 nuptials, she grew restless and eventually pinpointed that some of her dissatisfaction came from bridal party tension. “I was just so fed up with the way bridesmaids were treating me,” she says. “They’re all dressed up and beautiful, but nobody is paying attention to them.”

To curry favor, Smith began making headshots of each of the bridesmaids and groomsmen, then posted them on Facebook. This not only led to better treatment by the wedding party, but she landed several portrait bookings.

“I gave them that little moment that made them the center of the universe,” she says. “It completely changed everything.”

And that was the spark that set the flame. Smith uncovered the positive power from her portraiture and eschewed weddings altogether in 2012. She overhauled her business strategy completely but kept her pricing roughly the same as her weddings since the time investment was the same. It was tough to walk away from the security of weddings, but after her first session brought in $2,800, she didn’t look back. Now, she averages about $3,500 per session.

BEING PRECISE

Though her door is open to creative inspiration, Smith doesn’t leave anything up to chance when it comes to business. She’s specific in the information she delivers about pricing, sessions, products, and process. Everything is spelled out on her website with a thoughtful and detailed Session Preparation page that explains what a client can expect during the initial consultation, what she should bring to the session, posing tips to practice (like “ballet hands”), a session timeline, and even studio rules.

Since the pandemic, Smith has handled pre-shoot consultations through Facebook Messenger, with a dedicated meeting time set to chat. She has a couple of reasons for handling it this way versus a phone or even a FaceTime call. First, she feels that phone calls get too easily sidetracked. If she’s in Messenger, she knows she can get through her process without straying too far off course. Second, it puts her pricing in writing one more time.

“If we’re talking on the phone, they’ll just hear the base session fee and forget about the rest,” she says. “When we’re in a chat, I have it in writing and I also send them a short video about pricing. I’m informing them very thoroughly about pricing and how everything works so there are no surprises.”

Smith is also specific about session and consultation appointments, and she doesn’t deviate. Consultations are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with two appointment times available; sessions are on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 10 a.m. Everything is clear on her website and communicated in emails and through consultation. Clients know exactly what to expect, which gives them the confidence of knowing that Smith is in control and taking care of them.

“Our process is incredibly streamlined,” says Smith. “I take great pride in the system that I and my studio manager, Madison, have created together over the last four years. It has made this process easy to follow for our clients but also given us a space to be inspired by the women and men that we photograph.”

LETTING GO

Finding her artistic and business confidence and being detailed about her processes and products led Smith to an epiphany that gave her even more freedom: She realized that she isn’t competing with anyone.

“I had been very annoyed for a long time about what other photographers were doing,” she says. “But I realized it’s like a writer and voice. Great writers have a great voice, and different writers do different things. Tech writers are just writing what they’re told, there is no voice. But epic novelists are writing something completely different. Sometimes you need the tech writer and sometimes you need the novelist.”

Once Smith realized she was fulfilling a completely different need for her clients, she was able to let go of the worry about what everyone else was doing. What she provides to portrait subjects isn’t attainable from anyone else. And what other clients seek from other photographers in her area isn’t something she wants to provide.

“They can go to anyone for Christmas cards, but they come to me when they want something meaningful, when they need a soul portrait and to see themselves with loving eyes,” she says. “My studio space is the one space I know I can be my most authentic self. To look into another person and find beauty reflected back at you, that’s the most profound beauty you can experience on this planet. And when my clients see that reflected back at them, feel that freedom, feel that self-love, it makes us both better people.”

Stephanie Boozer is a writer in Charleston, South Carolina.