So thrilled to be asked by Gilded Bridal to photograph what was a ridiculously fun model session out at The Prettiest Pieces in Greensboro, NC! With talented models Rosie McVeigh, Rachel Atkinson, Candace Smith, and Gracie Kirkland, and with help from the awesome teams at Makeup by Ashley Mooney  and ZimZoom Photobooth, we took a bunch of photos of photographs showcasing the variety of gorgeous designer wedding dresses that Susan keeps in stock at Gilded (and if you want a peek at more from her store, check out this other shoot I did for her last month!). It is SO MUCH FUN to work model shoots, especially when you have talented and gorgeous women to work with who are incredibly adaptive and incredibly good at smiling for four hours even when you throw a bunch of glitter at them.

I’ve been really excited to photograph these guys since they listed Friday Night Lights as the best TV show and Pearl Jam as the best band on the contact form questionnaire. Then I completely even forgot to talk to them about it because I was too wrapped up in their awesome house and incredibly good looking selves. This family is adorable! Even Mason, the dog, is handsome and well behaved. Hannah and Sydney, the twins, are 3.5 and full of spunk and amazing dance moves. They’re fraternal twins instead of identical, but it’s pretty difficult for me to tell them apart, and if I were their parents, I’d definitely be dressing them as the twins from The Shining for every Halloween as long as they’d let me. They have Whitney Houston Wednesdays, where they dance around their living room to Whitney Houston songs, but they made an exception this week and moved it to Saturday. Adam and Rachel put the twins on their shoulders and then did some sort of synchronized dip like Olympic figure skaters and it was pretty amazing. So amazing, in fact, that I forgot entirely to talk to them about Coach Taylor.

Dear clients, fans, and followers,

Thank you so much for getting us here.

Since 2008, people have been putting their faith in us and hiring us to document some of the most important days in their lives, which of course includes their wedding day. Geoff and I have worked side by side and photographed hundreds and hundreds of weddings. We’ve been witnesses and signed licenses. We’ve been guests and photographers and planners and stylists. We’ve bustled dresses and cried happy tears and got caught in the rain. We’ve joined second line parades and worn rain boots in hurricanes and spent cricket-filled summer nights under the stars. We’ve shot on beaches and mountaintops and hillsides in Italy. We’ve laughed and hugged and been asked for our phone numbers from a lot of your wedding guests. We have had the job and career of a lifetime.

But! We are getting older (what?!), and our backs are hurting a little more each Sunday morning, and our time is becoming very valuable to us. While we have loved spending the weekends of our last 10 years celebrating with you, we would now like to spend them with our own friends and family. So while it’s bittersweet to do so, we are announcing our retirement from the wedding industry.

Before you lose your minds, I am very happily staying in the photography industry, and I cannot be more thankful. I am lucky enough to be able to smoothly transition into just lifestyle family and small business branding photography, two things which I absolutely love. I’m so grateful for the clients who are allowing me to do this, who have followed me for years since their weddings or have hired me time upon time for their portraits. Thank you for helping support my work (and, let’s face it, support the medical bills of our cats).

BUT WHAT ABOUT GEOFF, you ask.

Geoff is retiring to his Star Wars action figure-filled man cave of an office to have just one job for once in his adult life. While he’s been meeting with clients at nights, photographing engagement sessions in the evenings, and photographing weddings on the weekends, he’s also held down a 9-5 software engineering job. So he’ll be retiring fully from shooting, but he’ll still be building and maintaining the CSP website, answering nonstop tech support questions from me during the day because computers aren’t really my thing, and probably reading your e-mails. He will miss all of you very much, but you can still say hi to him (he is not dead).

We want to thank each and every wedding client we have ever had. We love you. We thank you. We appreciate your trust in us. We are so glad to be a small part of a very important day for you. It’s been an honor. We have had the most incredible adventures, and I have enough stories to write several nonfiction books, but I won’t because your secrets are safe with me.

We also want to thank our remaining 9 wedding clients this year who have been absolutely STELLAR in supporting us when I wrote to them a month ago and broke the news. We are still 100% committed to photographing their weddings, but wanted to launch the new portrait-based website now, rather than later, to avoid fielding wedding inquiry e-mails for the next 11 months, and thought they might become alarmed when it mentioned I USED to be a wedding photographer. I anticipated some might be upset, but the responses were largely: “I only plan on getting married once, so why would I care?” and “Do we get farewell tour t-shirts?” We could not love our clients more.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. I look forward to keeping in touch with all of you on my new journey as a family and business branding photographer, and Geoff looks forward to waving at you from his office filled with miniature Kylo Rens.

We have loved being your wedding photographers.

Love,
Carolyn+Geoff

P.S. From a business perspective to past wedding clients: we will still have your wedding pictures! If any of you suddenly encounter a corrupt USB or some other issue, don’t worry, we aren’t just deleting photos left and right over here. We will still have them, so feel free to e-mail us. Your wedding galleries can also be put back online if any of them have expired at any time, so don’t fret. BUT – if you’re looking to have a book or album done, we will not be offering them after this year, so get on that. Otherwise, don’t worry, your wedding photographs are still safe on a variety of hard drives and the cloud. :)

P.P.S. This was my favorite wedding photograph from the moment I took it. I thought maybe someday I might take one that topped it, but while I came close, nothing quite compares to this one. Thank you to Cari and Will for letting your nephews’ collapse and mental breakdown be plastered all over the internet for several years. Let this be this photograph’s last shining public moment.