Category: Couples

This was our very, very last shoot of 2014 and we have to say that it was a very good year. Soon we’ll be posting our year-in-review posts, but we had to put this up first to officially end our year right. :) We couldn’t have asked for two better people to round out the last twelve months with! Also, we’re kind of oddly similar. Apparently Carson just recently shaved his beard, or else it might be difficult to tell us all physically apart. My sister saw the sneak peek I posted of them right after the session, and had a strong negative reaction when she thought some other guy was kissing me (right before the holidays, no less!) and wondered what I had done with Geoff, until she realized that was not, in fact, me in the picture.

Virginia and Carson recently got engaged, and they also recently moved to Durham. Virginia accepted a position as a librarian at Duke and Carson is in law school, and Durham happened to be a great location for the both of them to do their adult job stuff. So they moved into an adorable house with their furry friends: cats Spike and Pickles, and Brittany Spaniel named QuiQui (who is, obviously, European). Virginia really wanted to have engagement photos, but she really didn’t want to have them actually taken, but she promised us she wouldn’t roll her eyes through the whole session, so we showed up at their house and went to work. And throughout the entire thing, both in their home and out on 9th street in the cold, Virginia didn’t roll her eyes once! In fact, her and Carson were just plain adorable. They cooked in their kitchen (mmm, cheese spread), played guitar for us on their porch (they are talented musicians and singers!), and were generally very receptive to cuddling on their couch with QuiQui and also posing by strange vans in alleyways. We had an awesome time getting to know them both, and we’re so happy to have been able to finish our year with this really cute duo.

We could shoot in people’s homes all day. We love houses, we love architecture, and we love looking at how other people decorate…. especially when they’re an architect. :) Guys, remember Lauren and Nick?! They moved to Atlanta shortly after their wedding in Raleigh and we’ve seen Lauren a few times since when she’s come home to visit (and to join us at Steely Dan concerts). But this time we went down to Atlanta, Georgia to see them both and to photograph them in their home and with their kittens Maple & Moo (actually named Rocky, but with the striking cow resemblance, it’s hard to pass on the nickname).

Lauren’s an architect and they bought this awesome house in the city, but they knew it needed work. It was previously a duplex, so they had to gut the whole thing, completely redesign it, and rebuild the entire interior save for the load-bearing walls (wanna see how they did it? Check out Lauren’s blog on her house!). The house was split directly down the middle with one apartment on one side and one on the other. In their current living room stood a bathroom (complete with giant bathtub) and several super tiny rooms. Their guest bedroom was once a living room and a galley kitchen. It was a SERIOUS project and renovation, but it has to be so awesome to be living in a house that you designed and created yourselves (it also causes Lauren and Nick to love to watch HGTV and make fun of people turning down houses based on paint color and granite countertops).

So our task for this particular shoot was to photograph them in their home but mostly focus on the house. We were, essentially, to make Lauren and Nick those tiny little model people used in architectural models for scale. We knew exactly what they were looking for as we would love to have the same thing in our house, so we were super excited to get to work. But then we were introduced to their kittens. And we used kittens for scale, sure, but… kittens. I couldn’t help but take too many pictures of the cats (is that a thing?). So get ready for tiny Lauren+Nick, lots of cats (scale and otherwise), and a ridiculous amount of gorgeous furniture and design (I’m pretty sure I left lots of things in their guest bedroom to make sure I could slyly return to their house again).