Durham Branding Photographer

Carolyn Scott is a Durham branding photographer. She specializes in candid and editorial branding photography in the Triangle area (Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Cary, etc). Carolyn’s work has been published in several popular books and magazines, including Apartment Therapy, BuzzFeed, and Fangoria. Locally, she’s been voted Best Photographer in Durham Magazine’s Best Of Durham and INDY Week’s Best of the Triangle. She lives in South Durham with her husband Geoff and three cats.

It was such a joy to be asked by Tosha and Brian, the talented photographer and DJ duo behind Story+Rhythm, to photograph their new branding photos for them! We worked with them back in 2015 (time flies!) and so I was super excited to reunite with them! Tosha is the photographer in this relationship and Brian is the DJ. Sometimes they work together, and sometimes separately. I think it’s neat how they’re partners in the same industry but have completely different jobs and roles. It’s always fascinating to talk with different vendors to see what happens to them behind the wedding scenes! So Tosha, Brian, and myself walked about the city and discussed weddings and venues and photography life without Geoff. Geoff’s been missing all of my recent client reunions because he’s retired now, but he did happen to be downtown for a work conference on this particular day and was sticking around so we could go see Coheed afterward at the Ritz. While my face was in the viewfinder, he sidled up next to me and I definitely thought my camera was going to get stolen, but nope, it was just Geoff. So he did get to say hello to Tosha and Brian – hah! It was so much fun to work with them again. If you need a wedding photographer or a DJ, please check out their awesome work! https://storyandrhythm.com/

Living and working in Durham has been so great for us. We bought our home here in 2012 and we’ve seen the city grow a lot since then: new restaurants and entertainment, new buildings and apartments, and new places for me to find gluten-free pizza (thank you, Durham!). So I was pretty excited when I was asked to shoot some photos of the Central Park District for Discover Durham. My client Jacques, who you all know and love!, works there and asked me to do these pictures (yay!), and together we walked 13,000 steps of Durham and talked to a lot of strangers to get these shots. Discover Durham is every Durhamite’s best friend. They’re essentially the folks who help Durham thrive via marketing, advocation, attracting visitors and spreading the word about events. If you don’t follow them on Instagram, you 100% should. Their stories are great at listing all the local Durham things you can do every weekend, usually accompanied by a hefty dose of humor. They’re one of my favorite accounts. Follow them here! PLUS they always have great photos, so I’m thrilled that they asked me to do this shoot. So many thanks to Jacques and Ashley of Discover Durham for hanging out with me at this session, and thank you to all the Durham businesses and individuals who gave their permission to be a part of this project.

Ella is a high school senior and I had the privilege of photographing her senior portraits on an extremely warm (!) fall evening. She handled the extreme heat and the garden variety bugs like a champ. The light and the wildflowers cooperated quite nicely and we had a great time! Ella is sweet, passionate, fun, and loves cats and dogs (my kind of person). Her mother claims that she’s existed entirely on carbs up to this point (which I can definitely relate to), and we also have tuxedo cats and an older sister in common. She also loves pizza, but she’s a pineapple-on-pizza type of girl so I have to draw our pizza comparisons to an end there. She’s skilled at sports and played softball for most of her education, but now she’s looking forward to a profession in nursing in order to help people. I can’t wait to see what Ella does in the future! I grabbed a few shots of her sister Claire and mom Susan toward the end – such a fun bunch who came along to support Ella and give her reminders of mac and cheese as she posed.