Koh may be the most widely recognized professional family photographers in the country. She is the author of a series of best-selling books offering instruction and creative inspiration — including Your Baby in Pictures, Your Child in Pictures, and Your Family in Pictures — and runs a series of popular photography workshops. But she is probably best known for her frequent appearances on TV talk shows, such as Live with Kelly and Michael, where she dispenses tips on shooting family portraits and capturing everyday moments.

She also has her own series on the Disney Junior Channel called Capture Your Story with Me Ra Koh. The show is aimed at mothers, the documentarians of the family, but it appeals to a younger demographic as well.

“It turns out I have a following of three and and year olds,” Koh says. “If I’m in a park, I will have kids coming up to show me their photos. I have moms sending me photos of their kids kissing me goodnight on the TV.”

It is safe to say that Koh, who still squeezes 10 photo shoots into her schedule each year, is adept at the art of marketing. She has established herself as a brand — specifically, the Photo Mom, a familiar, trusted face offering practical advice and endless encouragement — and extended that brand across print, television and social media. Her timing was perfect: Visual storytelling, from street photography and travel photography to family photography, has probably never been more popular, thanks in part to today’s cameras and Internet sharing.

“In the digital age, so many women began coming into photography. And they didn’t have anyone to look to — they didn’t have a Rachel Ray. So the idea was, ‘Why not be that person for them?’” says Koh.

But her career and her brand identity were shaped by an instinct that goes well beyond marketing, or photography for that matter. “At the heart of everything I do — what gets me out of bed in the morning — is finding ways to empower women to do more than they think they’re capable of doing,” Koh says. “The camera is an incredible vehicle for helping women find their confidence.”

From Words to Pictures

There’s a sense of confidence in Koh’s portraits and candid family photos, a happy connection between the photographer and subject.

“From the beginning of my career, I learned that successful photography was not so much about getting the technical stuff right as much as making the people in front of the camera feel comfortable. That is what is valued,” she says.

Part of her success as the Photo Mom may in fact stem from her ability to talk about creative photography without using technical jargon. “When I was teaching myself photography 15 years ago, I was so frustrated with camera manuals — I didn’t understand anything they were saying. So I started coming up with my own definitions for things,” she says. “I remember asking one photographer friend how to capture ‘buttery blurry backgrounds’ in my pictures. That’s still the way I think of them.”

The story of how Koh came to photography and built the career she has now does not move in a straight line. Before she ever picked up a camera, she was a writer. Her book Beauty Restored: Finding Life and Hope After Date Rape told her own story of healing after an incident that occurred when she was in college.

“I poured myself into that book, which took over 10 years to write,” she says. “It came out the same day my daughter was born. And when she was three months old we hit the road and did a book tour — TV and radio shows and conferences, sharing my story and meeting other women.” Two years later, she was pregnant with her second child and speaking at a women’s conference in Tennessee when, as she puts it, “something didn’t feel physically right.” She later lost the unborn child, a son named Aiden. “I hit such a low point of sadness and grief that I quit writing and spent a year on my couch,” she says.

And that is where she discovered photography.

“One day,” she recalls, “I was lying there, with my daughter playing next to some French doors in our house, and the afternoon sun was coming in, and it spilled over her and illuminated her in the most beautiful way. And I thought, I want to learn how to capture that forever.” Koh went to a Costco, bought an SLR and rolls of 400-speed film and methodically taught herself to shoot pictures.

“It didn’t matter what anyone said I could or couldn’t do, or if I was smart enough — the pain I was in superseded all the fear and doubt,” she says. “What struck me at first was that storytelling is just the same, whether it’s writing or done with a camera. It’s about looking for conflict and defining details that personify someone or capture setting. So all that creativity I had done over 10 years in writing just seemed to flow out of me in photography.”

From Weddings to Families

A few of Koh’s friends, impressed with her pictures of her daughter, asked her to photograph their families. “After a while I thought I should see if I could charge for this. For my first family shoot I charged $85, and after a few months I raised it to $300,” she says. Then one friend asked her to photograph her wedding.

“I dragged my husband there with me, and it was the craziest wedding ever, with pouring rain and no shelter. I didn’t know anything about lighting or planning or timing. We charged $750, and after paying for film processing we probably made $200. But we had the best time working together, so we thought, ‘Let’s do more of these.’”

Within two years, Koh was one of the top high-end wedding photographers in the country, charging $20,000 for a job. And then she walked away from that career.

“After five years of shooting weddings, I realized that what I wanted to do was show women how photography could change their lives the way it changed mine,” Koh says. “So we took a leap of faith and left behind our wedding photography.”

The personal decision turned out to be a wise professional one, as more women began buying new digital cameras and a new market emerged. Within six months of her decision to leave wedding photography, Koh was the in-house photo expert on interior designer Nate Berkus’s television show on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Then she was approached by the Disney Junior Channel. She is currently working on a new series about family travel.

It was eight years ago that Koh also launched her Confidence Photography Workshop for Women series — weekend-long events that, as the name suggests, are about more than just taking pictures.

Koh believes there is a special creativity that women bring to photography — a vein that often lies buried under the mountain of tasks and concerns in their lives. She tells them how to tap into it.

“Women often approach the camera feeling like they’re not smart enough or technically savvy enough, or they think they simply don’t have the time because they’re overwhelmed by how much there is to learn,” she says. “The workshop is about getting to the heart of what makes a woman different in her creativity and embracing those attributes, knowing that the things that scare you and that you think aren’t good enough about you are actually the things you’ll stand on and will be what draw people to you.”