Category: Couples

Objectives: to photograph the amazingly talented and gorgeous Perry Vaile of Perry Vaile Photography alongside her handsome husband Shawn. Also, to photograph the slightly elusive and slightly adorably-crosseyed cat Lexie. Also, to photograph the previous racing dogs learning how to be precious house dogs Huckleberry and Finnigan. This was the mission I accepted at their house. The second mission was to go to Perry’s neighbor’s farm down the road and photograph them there… where there happened to be the most adorable miniature donkeys ever.  Now, I’m not sure that “ever” really describes it as I’m fairly certain that miniature donkeys ANYWHERE would be the cutest ever, but, you know what I mean. So the house mission combined with the farm mission was total cuteness overload and WAY too much cute to photograph in 2 hours… so just know that I tried, Perry, but your family is way, way too cute… and thus this was only a glimpse into its cuteness.

I was super honored to be chosen by Perry to photograph her family this year as she is a WONDERFUL photographer and I was crazy nervous a bit like this. She and Shawn were so amazingly sweet to me and made me feel perfectly comfortable though… and I’m so happy to have worked on this for them!

Meaghan and TJ just moved up from Charleston where there wasn’t too much seasonal change, so they were pretty excited to do their engagement pictures in Raleigh in the fall with the leaves and the prettiness and so on. And the leaves were looking GREAT!! And then Sandy came through and blew a bunch of them away. :) But no fear! There were still some left in this forest! So we grabbed their props and walked down the lane and took pictures with the trees. We also, bizarrely enough, stumbled upon some sort of army training exercise where a bunch of guys in camo with artillery were sneaking around the woods that surrounded us. We really wanted them to pop up a few feet away in the background of the pictures, but alas, it was not to be. So we made our own fun by talking about silly stuff and being generally goofy and them being obviously cute and we found the NC State horses who were pretty photogenic but not as much as Meaghan and TJ. :) 

There will be a long and detailed explanation of how we ended up shooting Kelly and Danny’s wedding in the Outer Banks when I post their wedding pictures soon, but for now you’ll have to deal with their engagement session. I do believe that this was the first time we’ve done an engagement session in the morning. And by the morning, I mean we stumbled out of our bunk beds (yesss!) in the bridesmaids’ beach house in the dark and ended up on the beach with these two at 6:30am.

I can tell you that being in Corolla at 6:30am is basically like going on a safari. We saw engagement dolphins (lots of them!) very close to shore. We saw a creepy turtle eating a worm. We saw a cat with debatably one ear (upon zooming in during editing it was confirmed that he had two). We saw wild horses walking along the beach where our conversation went something like this:

Kelly: YAAAY WILD HORSES!

Carolyn: Okay, you guys just hold hands and walk toward us.

Kelly: So are we just supposed to pretend they’re not there?

Carolyn: Yeah, basically.

And of course, we saw Danny’s awesome mustache.