The Studio Takeover Podcast cover art

The Studio Takeover Podcast

The Studio Takeover Podcast

By: Cat Ford-Coates
Listen for free

The Studio Takeover podcast is about and for Portrait Photographers from all walks. Join host Cat Ford-Coates as she shares her journey and interviews other Portrait Photographers to learn how they navigate personal and professional challenges, their businesses, and their lives.© 2026 The Studio Takeover Podcast Art Economics Leadership Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • The Audacity to Choose with Kristen Fields

    The Audacity to Choose with Kristen Fields
    Jun 22 2026
    Send us Fan MailFor 23 years, Kristen Fields ran her photography business the only way her nervous system knew how: feast or famine, hypervigilant, thriving in chaos because chaos felt like home. Then something changed, and it wasn't a new funnel, a new offer, or working harder.In this episode, Cat sits down with Kristen, a Boise-based photographer 16 months into their work together, for one of the cleanest Flinch-to-Flow conversations we've put on the show. Kristen is building an empire in real time: a photography business taken international, a keynote and shoot in Mexico this September, and a book — The Audacity — on its way by year's end. But the inventory isn't the story. The story is how she learned to hold all of it and be at peace. How she got there is the part you'll want to hear in her own words.The Flinch Nobody Names Out LoudEvery photographer's flinch wears a different costume. Kristen's looked like constant constriction, chronic indecision, and handing her choices to other people so she'd never have to sit with what she actually wanted. Underneath it ran the same permission system so many creatives never consciously installed — the quiet rule that wanting more, being seen, and getting paid for your art are things you're supposed to apologize for.A year ago, she says, she was surviving. Existing by default. Chaos wasn't just tolerated — it was identity. In the episode she names the exact belief that kept her there for two decades, and the moment she caught it running the show. (It's the same wiring a lot of us carry in from scarcity, and Cat traces where it comes from.)The Question That Made Her FuriousThe shift didn't start with a strategy. It started with a single challenge from Cat — one Kristen admits she was "f*cking pissed" about for a long time. It became the title of her book. It also became the question this whole episode circles: what would it look like if you had the audacity to choose the life you actually want?We won't spoil how she answers it. But the conversation moves through the mechanism Cat comes back to again and again — why a decision, not a plan, is what actually compels you to change — and the retreat moment six months ago where Kristen stopped performing the work and started feeling it.What Flow Actually Looks LikeFlow doesn't mean the hard stuff stops showing up. It means it stops meaning something about who you are. Kristen gets honest about how she moves now when everything goes sideways — and how different that is from the version of her who'd spiral, grit, and drown in shame just two years ago.There's a thread here about regulation, visibility, and the fear that being seen isn't safe; including the surprising place that fear had been hiding in her body and her calendar. If you've ever believed a packed schedule was the only proof you were okay, this stretch of the episode is for you.Also In This EpisodeWhy The Audacity isn't written from victimhood, and the arc Kristen says every woman moves through, from "good girl" to Phoenix to sovereign.How her September keynote, her Sovereign destination campaign, and the book all feed each other — what Cat calls "satellite congruence."Where photography fits now that it's no longer the whole empire What actually makes a five-figure destination session worth it; and why it has almost nothing to do with the location.The unprompted thing Kristen's 12-year-old said before a school play that told her the change is already reaching the next generation.Find Kristen Here:Website: https://kristenfieldsphoto.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristenfieldsphoto/ Support the showABOUT CAT FORD-COATESCat Ford-Coates has been told to soften her whole career.She didn't.She built a multi-six-figure business teaching photographers that the thing keeping them stuck was never the market, the portfolio, or the pricing. It was the voice. The one that sounds like wisdom. The one that keeps moving the goalpost and calling it patience.She's spent over a decade in rooms with photographers who are extraordinarily talented and somehow still convinced they should be grateful for what they have.She disagrees. Loudly.Cat serves photographers who already know what they want. Who know what they're capable of. Who have known for a while, actually, and have spent years finding sophisticated reasons not to claim it.The question was never whether you're ready.You already know you are. Stop pretending that you don't.
    Show More Show Less
    57 mins
  • Shadow Series: The Overturning

    Shadow Series: The Overturning
    May 11 2026

    Send us Fan Mail

    The Shadow · "The Overturning"

    Seven episodes. Seven shadows. Seven lies that creative women tell themselves to stay exactly where they are.

    This is the last one.

    And it's the most sophisticated — because this shadow doesn't keep you from doing the work. She lets you talk about doing the work. She hands you the vocabulary, lets you name every pattern with tremendous clarity, and then watches while you adjust the rate before you send it anyway.

    Awareness is not transformation. Insight is not identity shift. Naming the cage is not the same as walking out of it.

    In this final episode, I'm not introducing another shadow. I'm telling you what I didn't say in any of the first seven — including what was running in me while I was building this series. And I'm telling you about a word that doesn't mean what you think it does.

    Catastrophe. From the Greek. Kata + strophe. Not the disaster. The overturning.

    The moment the structure that's been holding you in place gives way — not with a crash, but with a release — to something that was always there underneath it.

    The Torch is not a different woman. She is the same woman after she stops protecting herself from what she already knows.

    You've spent seven episodes doing the naming. Now do the choosing.

    Links:

    • Book announcement → https://substack.com/@catfordcoates
    • Instagram: @catfordcoates

    Tell me which shadow ran the longest. Come find me on Instagram.

    Support the show

    ABOUT CAT FORD-COATES

    Cat Ford-Coates has been told to soften her whole career.

    She didn't.

    She built a multi-six-figure business teaching photographers that the thing keeping them stuck was never the market, the portfolio, or the pricing. It was the voice. The one that sounds like wisdom. The one that keeps moving the goalpost and calling it patience.

    She's spent over a decade in rooms with photographers who are extraordinarily talented and somehow still convinced they should be grateful for what they have.

    She disagrees. Loudly.

    Cat serves photographers who already know what they want. Who know what they're capable of. Who have known for a while, actually, and have spent years finding sophisticated reasons not to claim it.

    The question was never whether you're ready.

    You already know you are. Stop pretending that you don't.
    Show More Show Less
    30 mins
  • The Shadow | Ep 6: “If I Raise My Prices I’ll Lose My Clients”

    The Shadow | Ep 6: “If I Raise My Prices I’ll Lose My Clients”
    May 4 2026

    Send us Fan Mail

    It sounds like market research. It sounds responsible. Like you've thought it through and landed somewhere reasonable.

    It's a prediction the Shadow made up.

    This episode sits with the honest version of that fear, including the part that might actually be true. Some clients might leave when the price changes. We're not going to pretend otherwise. But the clients who leave when the price changes were never buying your work. They were buying your discount. And the clients who are there for the work? They will value it more at a higher price point. Not less.

    The deeper thing this episode gets into: when you don't trust yourself at the higher number, you broadcast it. The self-doubt becomes the signal. And the prediction starts coming true; not because your prices were too high, but because you told them they might be.

    The clients who value your photography work will only value it at a higher level. The ones who left when the price changed were never yours to keep. They were the practice run. You’ve graduated


    Support the show

    ABOUT CAT FORD-COATES

    Cat Ford-Coates has been told to soften her whole career.

    She didn't.

    She built a multi-six-figure business teaching photographers that the thing keeping them stuck was never the market, the portfolio, or the pricing. It was the voice. The one that sounds like wisdom. The one that keeps moving the goalpost and calling it patience.

    She's spent over a decade in rooms with photographers who are extraordinarily talented and somehow still convinced they should be grateful for what they have.

    She disagrees. Loudly.

    Cat serves photographers who already know what they want. Who know what they're capable of. Who have known for a while, actually, and have spent years finding sophisticated reasons not to claim it.

    The question was never whether you're ready.

    You already know you are. Stop pretending that you don't.
    Show More Show Less
    11 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet