Tessa Rae Photography

This is what fall photos look like in the desert 🌵
Glowing golden hour, sun kissed skin, and bare feet in the dirt.

I’ve been with this family since their oldest was a baby, even watched him take his very first steps during one of our sessions.

Forever grateful for all the ways I get to watch love grow 🤍

Sedona adventures, sunset skies, and barefoot on mountain tops.
This is what it’s all about 🤍

6am thoughts..

i am not afraid of my softness
the same parts of me that are my greatest weakness
are also my most sublime strengths
i want to feel
all of my humanness
cracked wide open
an unapologetic lover with a fierceness
a savage when i choose myself

i talk to god more lately
i ask him why he made me so intense
he must have said- make this one a paradox.

and then i feel the sun set, i feel the wind
i watch the desert come alive when it rains
and see galaxies in the eyes of strangers

i don’t know much about anything,
but i know i will have lived this life- felt holy, fully alive
and humbled in all its duality.

bring the sunrise over my heart
the same dirt the seeds are buried in
always bloom.

I don’t always do weddings, but when I do it’s one of my favorite things 🤍

The quiet intimate moments we have the capability to create in a day that usually moves so fast, is my favorite part. The only time they are truly alone together that day, is when they’re with the photographer. Watching them soak it in, be close, and have a little time to honor each other’s presence.

how rare & beautiful it is to even exist 💫

Cannot believe I’m just now sharing this session from my workshop last summer. It was one of those I just didn’t want to let go of because it felt so tender and sacred. If I had one chance to photograph what a relationship with a mother and her baby girl should feel like, this would be it. Always in awe of the stories I get to see, the love I get to feel, and the golden glow I call my office ☀️

and as usual- there’s neverrrr enough slides to share it all 😂

Women are so damn incredible.
So fu***ng powerful.
I said what I said. And I MEANT it.
Women are capable of things that no other being on this earth can do. The way you hold your emotions, the way you stand in your strength, how you selflessly serve in love. Tender. Fierce. Delicate. Sovereign. Untamed.

Remember who you are. Remember your power.

Witnessing so many women under golden desert skies, being the mirror to remind them who they are… I never feel as alive as I do when I’m sharing sunsets with all of you. Thank you for choosing me 🪶

Artists love in a way no one else can.
They’ll fall for the way the sun catches the slope of your cheek, find poems written in the lines of your smile, the delicacy of your fingertips, the galaxies in your eyes and how the light reflects in them, how shadows bend to your frame.
They will find hundreds of small beauties, and immortalize you for them.

Find an artist, let them see you.

I’ve been photographing this mama over the course of 6 years, and she also has taken some of the most favorite photos of me and my babies- when I wore my momma’s jean jacket. I watched her become a mama, nurse her baby girl, watched her little Rose grow, and now with her second sweet babe. A sunset in open fields, picking flowers, somersaults, and all love. This will be a forever favorite session of mine. So grateful for the millions of moments I’ve seen over the years that are so sacred.

The way art intertwines lives and stretches over time, that in itself is poetry.

It’s been three months. They say time is a thief, but it is also the greatest illusion. How can three months pass, yet if I sink deep enough into the ways the minute hand weaves, my bones sting as if it were just yesterday. Fresh. Like I’m right back and shattered on my living room floor with the Christmas tree glowing at midnight, physically feeling your soul separate from mine. Grief is both tender and vicious. Impossibly tangled, as delicate as the threads of a spiders web. It can cocoon you up in its warmth of memories, or devour you like it’s been starving for weeks. It’s days of deciding to water your plants, or watch them wilt just like you. There are no words for the in between you sit in, somewhere in the middle of a love so rare and a loss so agonizing. The world is different now. Slow, separate from the noise. Anything shallow or superficial seems like such a waste. The irony in how death makes you feel acutely alive. I see you in everything. A fresh breath of air at dawn that fills your lungs like it’s the first time you’ve felt it. Colors of a sunset so radiant you wonder how your eyes could have ever missed it before. I have thought of you every single day. Some days, I feel your light so close to mine. Your laugh echos in my ears. A melody. Other days I am swallowed whole at a stop light and wonder how I’ll ever live without you. Thank you for it all, Grandpa. The delicate love that softened me and the callousness that readied me for this. Memories that feel like they are trying to kill me and save me all at once. Even in all the roads we walked- I’d take them all again if it meant one more car ride singing your songs, one more night of you sneaking my son chocolates, the way you followed me down the dirt to wave goodbye a second time, to hold your worn hands in mine, to bury my face into that place on your chest that smells like vintage old spice and aftershave. Home. In the void you left, you took the veil with you and have illuminated how truly fleeting, fragile, and beautiful life is. One last act of love you gave. I have loved you with all that I am. Wait for me in the place where souls find each other again, and love never dies.