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What if you're not booking the weddings you want because you're showing the wrong photographs? Not because your work isn't beautiful. Not because you need another styled shoot in France. And definitely not because you need to spend the next six weeks rebranding your entire business. What if your portfolio is telling a story you don't even realize it's telling? After reviewing hundreds of photographers' portfolios over the years—and recently completing 15 back-to-back reviews—I've noticed something fascinating: incredibly talented photographers are often showcasing work that doesn't reflect their artistic vision, their desired pricing, or the clients they actually want to attract. In today's episode of Play It Brave, we're talking about the difference between having beautiful photographs and having a beautifully curated portfolio that positions you as the obvious choice. We're getting into: The Dior window-display effect: What luxury brands understand about capturing attention that photographers often miss. Three portfolio traps: The sentimental edit, the everything edit, and the outdated edit—and how they may be affecting your inquiries. The nine-image experiment: What your first nine photographs are communicating about your artistic identity and your value. Why more photographs don't mean more bookings: How a clear visual point of view can make you more memorable and desirable. The hidden gems on your hard drive: Why you might already have the work you need to attract your next level of clients. And I'm inviting you to something special! You're invited to my FREE Curation Party! Thursday, November 5, 2026 | 10 AM Mountain Time I'm hosting a live portfolio curation experience called 3 Edits to Your Portfolio to Book the Clients You Actually Want. I'll take you inside my creative process and show you how I evaluate photographs, recognize an artist's visual signature, and choose images that communicate value. We'll look at real portfolio examples, talk about the nine images that make a powerful first impression, and explore how to position your work for the weddings you want to photograph next. Bring your portfolio, a notebook, and your coffee. We're going to have some fun. Save your free seat: [REGISTER HERE] Because your portfolio isn't just a collection of your best photographs. It's an introduction to the photographer you want to become. And engagement season is coming. Let's make sure your portfolio is ready. Listen to the episode, then join me November 5!

Facebook ads have made me millions, and they've also cost me sixty thousand dollars in a single agency contract. After a year and a half of mostly not running them, I'm turning my ads back on, so I sat down with Claire Pelletreau, creator of Absolute FB Ads and the teacher my team learned from, to ask everything I wanted to know before spending my own money again. We talk about her one simple ad, why complicated targeting has given way to ads that do the targeting themselves, why cheap leads are so often the wrong leads, how long to leave an ad alone, and how a luxury wedding photographer with no course and no webinar could use ads to find $10,000 clients. Claire also shares what happened the year she turned her own ads off, and why paying for marketing was never cheating.

Christina McGarvey grew up in a dilapidated Victorian farmhouse in Petersboro, Utah, watching her mother hang wallpaper, lay floors, and carve her own four-poster bed on a lathe. Decades later she built her own dream home, lost her sister, her mother, her father and her uncle in a single year, and somewhere inside that grief started selling the things she loved on Instagram. Today Millcreek Manor fills a 7,000-square-foot warehouse with antiques shipped by the container from England and Scotland, and a 440-piece container sold out in one weekend. We talk about whether good taste can be learned, how she decides what to buy when she's making hundreds of decisions in a week, what she does with the fear when the bank account gets small, and why the only way into a business you were never trained for is to begin. Plus: Millcreek Manor's holiday market, a little piece of a European Christmas market right here in Salt Lake, on November 20–21. The shop is open every Friday and Saturday until 4 pm, and they ship nationwide.

For years, I recognized Pamela Anderson without knowing much about the woman behind the image. Seeing her differently made me question what I'd overlooked—and how often people do the same with us. In this solo episode, I explore what happens when your brand keeps introducing an earlier version of you. I share my own evolution from photography into coaching and writing, a lesson from helping rebrand a client, and three questions to help you see whether your brand reflects the work you want to do now.

You can be extraordinary at what you do and still have a brand that makes strangers scroll right past you. In this episode, D'Arcy sits down with brand strategist and researcher Dr. Chelsea Shields to show you what a brand actually does, and it's a lot more than a logo, a palette, or a pretty website. They walk through real before-and-afters: a beauty brand that renamed itself so it could grow, a billion-dollar health company that traded its muscle-man logo for a story nobody can argue with, and the leadership brand D'Arcy and Chelsea rebuilt together, down to the one word on the homepage her clients would never have used about themselves. Because sometimes your talent isn't the problem. Your brand just isn't saying it yet. This one is visual. Watch the before-and-afters on YouTube: [YOUTUBE LINK]

If your brand feels beige, the question may go deeper than fonts, photographs, or a new website. What happens when being unmistakably yourself still feels unsafe? After visiting Glastonbury, D'Arcy explores the fear of being seen through the archetype of the "dangerous woman," the patterns women may carry through family and culture, and the ways we edit our gifts to remain acceptable. She offers a different understanding of safety: trusting yourself to meet criticism, misunderstanding, or rejection without abandoning who you are. For the artists, healers, intuitives, and women building businesses, this is an invitation to become visible one honest act at a time—and to imagine what we could create with the energy we once spent hiding.

There are more tools than ever to create a beautiful brand — so why are so many businesses starting to look exactly the same? In this episode, D'Arcy sits down with anthropologist and consumer researcher Dr. Chelsea Shields to unpack three mistakes they see even incredibly talented businesses making: playing it too safe, building from inside their own perspective instead of understanding the buyer, and creating a brand that may be beautiful but isn't distinctive enough to be remembered. They talk about why your greatest differentiator may be the thing you can't see in yourself, what the people who almost bought can teach you, why bold doesn't have to mean controversial, and how generic visuals can make extraordinary work feel surprisingly ordinary. They also explore what happens when you've outgrown the identity your audience originally followed you for — and why evolving your brand doesn't mean abandoning everything you've built. Ultimately, D'Arcy makes the case for something bigger than creating a prettier brand: Don't just build a brand. Build a world. Because content can fill a feed. A great brand should make someone feel something — and give the right person a world she wants to step into. Connect with Dr. Chelsea Shields: [CHELSEA WEBSITE] Connect with D'Arcy: [D'ARCY WEBSITE] [D'ARCY INSTAGRAM]

What happens when you build the business everyone else dreams about—and realize you don't want to live that life anymore? India Earl had become one of the most recognizable photographers in her industry. She traveled the world, had clients waiting years to work with her, built an enormous audience, and created an education business capable of generating hundreds of thousands of dollars. From the outside, it looked like extraordinary success. Inside, she was exhausted. India originally hired D'Arcy because she thought they were going to make the business even bigger: better funnels, better marketing, more passive income. Instead, one question changed everything: What if you didn't have to keep doing any of it? What followed was a years-long journey through burnout, identity, boundaries, archetypes, embodiment, creativity, the wild feminine—and ultimately an entirely different relationship with success, work and herself. In this episode, India and D'Arcy talk about what it means to leave something that is still working, why success can make reinvention harder, learning to disappoint people instead of abandoning yourself, taking a creative sabbatical, and trusting that if you built something extraordinary once, you can create again. If you're wondering whether you've outgrown your business, career, identity or the life you worked so hard to create, this conversation is for you. PLUS: D'Arcy is opening three private 1:1 coaching spaces at her current rate before her pricing increases October 15. Details and clarity-call link below Clarity-Call Link

What if one job didn't have to equal one payday? Most of us finish the work, get paid, deliver what we promised — and immediately start hunting for the next client. But there may be far more money sitting inside work you've already created. In this short episode, D'Arcy shares a simple way to look at every finished job through three lenses: NOW — the money it makes today. AGAIN — how the same work can be sold, packaged or used again. POSSIBLE — the referrals, reputation, relationships and future opportunities it can create. You'll hear what this looks like for photographers, coaches, writers and other creative entrepreneurs — and how to stop turning every good idea into more work by asking one simple question: What is the easiest next move? Because the goal isn't to work more. It's to make the work you've already done work harder for you.

I charged $4,500 to photograph the wedding. Then the mother of the bride logged into the gallery and, within about an hour, ordered $7,000 in prints. And she came back and ordered even more. That experience completely changed the way I thought about what happens after a photographer delivers the images. We spend so much time trying to book the next client that we often forget there is revenue, marketing, referrals and future business sitting inside work we've already created. In this episode, I'm breaking down how I've used galleries, physical prints, albums and vendor relationships to make one wedding keep working long after the wedding day is over. You'll hear: The simple thing I did before that $7,000 print order Why gallery delivery shouldn't be the end of the client journey How prints and albums can create revenue without another photoshoot Why your gallery itself is part of your brand How I've used curated galleries to help book clients before I ever photograph them How I photograph specifically for wedding vendors so they actually want to share my work My strategy for getting the entire vendor team to market a wedding on the same day How I use Pic-Time to make the entire process easier The question I want you asking after this episode is: Are you constantly chasing the next client while ignoring the value already sitting inside the work you've created? TRY PIC-TIME

What did Dolly Parton believe about herself before the rest of the world believed it too? In this tribute to Dolly, D'Arcy explores the beliefs underneath an extraordinary creative life: letting yourself want something enormous, refusing to tone down what makes you different, knowing when gratitude doesn't require staying, continuing to create when the market moves on, and making something simply because it needs to exist. The question underneath all of it: what do you already know about your life that you keep asking the room to approve?

Eileen Budd comes from a long line of Scottish storytellers. Her grandfather came home from the war with shrapnel in his legs, took a job driving a tour bus, and out-earned every other driver in Scotland — because he told stories while he drove. Nobody discovered Eileen was legally blind until she was eight, so she learned the world by ear: story by story, told out loud, passed down. In this episode she tells three complete folk tales on air — including the three rules for surviving the Queen of the Fairies — opens her Travelling Folk Museum of donated, two-hundred-year-old objects, and makes the case that the stories of the village, not the castle or the church, are the ones that bring people together. Plus: why we've outsourced our imaginations to our phones, what a story did to a $30 compass on eBay, the folk tale that is secretly about postnatal depression, and how to find the story only you can tell. Your imagination: use it or lose it. How to Tell a Story People Can't Stop Repeating — with Scottish Storyteller Eileen Budd Some stories disappear almost as soon as they're told. Others survive for hundreds of years. They cross villages, families, kitchens, campfires, churches, pubs and generations without ever needing an algorithm to carry them. That is the kind of story Eileen Budd knows how to tell. Eileen comes from a long line of Scottish storytellers, and she learned the world by listening. Nobody discovered she was legally blind until she was eight, so while other children were reading the room visually, Eileen was absorbing voices, details, rhythms and stories. And in this conversation, she reminded me of something I think many of us are losing: storytelling is not the same thing as content. A story asks something of your imagination. It leaves space. It lets you see something that is not physically in front of you. And the best stories become portable. Someone hears them, carries them away, and tells them again. That is what this episode is really about. Eileen tells three complete folk tales on the podcast, including the story of a midwife summoned to the Queen of the Fairies, the rules she must follow to survive, and a changeling story that carries an unexpectedly compassionate understanding of postnatal depression. But we also talk about what happens to imagination when we fill every empty moment with scrolling, why an ordinary $30 compass became worth $1,000 when it had a story attached to it, and why the stories of ordinary people — the stories of the village — may be the ones that connect us most deeply. One of my favorite things Eileen says is that we have started to outsource our imaginations. And I haven't stopped thinking about that. Because imagination requires empty space. Daydreaming. Wondering. Following an image somewhere without immediately needing it to become useful. And if you are an artist, photographer, writer, entrepreneur or simply a person trying to live a more creative life, I think this conversation will make you want some of that space back. Inside the episode We talk about Eileen's grandfather, who returned from war with shrapnel in his legs and became a Scottish tour-bus driver — eventually earning more than the other drivers because he told stories while he drove. Eileen explains the difference between stories of the castle, stories of the church and stories of the village, and why the stories of ordinary people are often the ones that bring us together. She shares why she resisted writing oral stories down for years, what changed her mind, and what can be lost when a living story gets trapped on a page. We talk about daydreaming, imagination and the way constant scrolling can crowd out the inner world. You'll hear the story of a $30 compass whose value changed completely once a story was attached to it, a 200-year-old willow rattle filled with quartz, the full tale of the midwife and the Queen of the Fairies, and Eileen's beautifully simple way of teaching someone how to become a storyteller. And we end with a Scottish origin story about the giants of day and night. If you make anything for a living, I especially want you to listen to the distinction running underneath this whole conversation: People may consume information. But they carry stories. Connect with Eileen Podcast: Scottish Folk Instagram: @eileenbudd Books: Eileen's seasonal folklore collections from Wide Open Sea https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/scottish-folk/id1674005044 https://www.wideopensea.co.uk/product/seasonal-folklore-summer

Why You Can't Stop Being Productive Why can it feel easier to keep working when you're exhausted than it does to simply stop? In this episode, D'Arcy looks underneath overworking to the unconscious patterns that can make rest surprisingly uncomfortable. Sometimes the issue isn't that we're "bad at resting." Rest isn't creating the anxiety. Rest is revealing the anxiety that activity was covering. Scarcity tells us there isn't enough time, money, momentum or opportunity, so stopping feels irresponsible. Being useful gets rewarded. Being capable becomes part of our identity. And eventually we can start living by rules we never consciously chose: I can rest when everything is handled. Everyone and everything gets taken care of before I do. I have to earn rest. Except everything is never handled — so we keep moving the finish line. D'Arcy shares how productivity became part of her own identity, what burnout forced her to confront, and what ten days in silence and two months away from Instagram taught her about who she is when she isn't producing. In this episode: Why rest can sometimes make you anxious How scarcity creates the urge to do more Why "I'll rest when…" becomes an impossible finish line When being capable turns into an identity How we condition ourselves to ignore our bodies and push through Why stillness can feel uncomfortable after years of productivity What silence taught D'Arcy about existing without being useful How to begin making an unconscious productivity pattern conscious Your Brain Rewire Finish this sentence: I can rest when __________. Then ask yourself: What do I believe rest says about me? What do I believe will happen if I stop? Whose approval did usefulness once earn me? The next time you feel the impulse to get up and make yourself useful, don't immediately obey it. Notice the rule first. Consciousness comes before choice.

There is an awakening happening in women right now. It isn't simply about making more money, building a bigger business, or becoming more successful. It's the question underneath all of it: Is this actually how I want to live? This week, D'Arcy sits down with her friend Kara Campbell — coach, gatherer of women, and founder of the Momentum mastermind — for a conversation about what happens when women stop proving, controlling, and doing everything alone... and start trusting themselves enough to receive. Kara shares the 63-hour labor that shattered her illusion of control and gave her a mantra she still lives by: I allow. I do not force. She talks about the voice that told her to be kind to yourself after years of self-hatred, and the moment she realized that counting money as an adult was carrying the same fear as counting calories in her twenties. Together, Kara and D'Arcy explore self-trust, feminine leadership, loneliness, desire, receiving, and the kind of female friendships that don't tell you who to become — they remind you who you already are. They talk about why queens don't compete with other queens, why the right women help return you to your own knowing, and what it means to be truly witnessed in your grief, joy, ambition, and becoming. And D'Arcy shares one of the hardest seasons of her own life — when she discovered that independence could no longer save her, and she had to learn how to ask her circle to carry her. Near the end, Kara shares something extraordinary: When a female elephant is vulnerable or in danger, the other females gather around her and form a circle. They stay there until the danger passes. This episode is about building that kind of circle — and allowing yourself to stand in the middle of it when it's your turn to be held.

Sometimes your work grows faster than your identity does. In 2012, I had spent years charging $4,500 for wedding photography when a dream client called me just 27 days before their Sundance wedding. When she asked what I would charge for the weekend, I heard myself say a number I'd never said before: $7,500. She said yes. Two weeks later, I booked my first $10,500 wedding. I didn't suddenly become twice as talented in six weeks. The work had been happening for years. My skill, eye, experience and judgment had already changed. My identity simply hadn't caught up. In this short episode of Play It Brave, we're looking at the version of you who names the price — and whether she's still pricing the work of a woman you've already outgrown. I'll also lead you through a simple rehearsal you can practice for the next 30 days so that when someone asks, "What do you charge?" you don't have to manufacture courage in real time. In this episode: why your identity can lag behind your actual level of mastery · the story behind my jump from $4,500 to $7,500 — and then $10,500 · how to recognize when you're pricing from an earlier version of yourself · what happens in your body when someone asks what you charge · why you don't need to justify your number before anyone has objected to it · a short exercise to rehearse saying your next price · why identity work isn't a substitute for mastery — but can help you finally own the mastery you've already earned. A question to take with you: has your price actually caught up to the person you've become? Your next number doesn't need to be a fantasy. It needs to be a number you have evidence underneath — and are ready to learn how to say. Ready to go deeper? If you know the strategy but something in you keeps pulling back when it's time to sell, be seen, raise your prices or step into the next version of your work — that's exactly the kind of pattern we can explore in a private Breakthrough. Book a free 30-minute clarity call.