Category: Weddings

A Fond Farewell to Wedding Photography

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.

Lizzie+Tommy // A Durham, NC Wedding

Well, it’s finally taken us ten years but we finally had a couple use their cat as a prop in their photobooth (not their actual cat, but a large cardboard photo of their cat) and Geoff and I took full advantage. It’s also taken us ten years to finally get a The Doge cookie cake at a wedding. What’s been taking all of you so long? So thanks to Lizzie and Tommy for finally making our dreams come true in so many ways. We had an awesome start to 2019 at their wedding, and are so glad they were our clients this year! Lizzie likes to make a variety of different faces which I appreciate (as someone who also makes a lot of faces) and she also likes to bust out into a variety of different dance moves (The Chicken Dance being a favorite but there are some other ones I am pretty sure she invented that are just as good). She is funny and wonderful and I want to hug her all the time. Tommy clearly feels the same way, and together they’re an unstoppable team of smarts and love for cats. Tommy just got into a fellowship at the University of Arizona, so they’ll be moved to Tucson shortly, where we will visit them and force our friendship and authentic Mexican cuisine upon them (Geoff’s parents live there). But we’re glad that they got married in the Durm where they shall hopefully return after they get some good tans. Their wedding was fabulous (as evidenced below) and you guys, I am telling you, the band Punch is THE BEST and we’re glad we got to see them again. We may or may not have stayed after we packed up all of our stuff to listen to them play Purple Rain because PRINCE YOU GUYS! Lizzie saw me swaying my invisible lighter in the corner and appreciated it as only one person who makes up ridiculous dance moves to another can.


Date: January 5, 2019
Ceremony + Reception Venue: The Cotton Room // Durham, NC
First Dance Song: “Coming Home” – Leon Bridges
Tommy’s Occupation: Surgeon
Lizzie’s Occupation: Marketing Extraordinaire
How You Met: Interwebs – the dating app formerly known as Hinge
Interesting Fact: Did we mention we have a cat. She is the best cat. Her name is Sazzy (short for Sazerac). We love board games, traveling, snow days, and OH! We’re about to move to Arizona for a year during Tommy’s fellowship at University of Arizona.
Honeymoon: St. Lucia in January…hopefully Japan in July!
Officiant: Dame Gracie Bassett
Band: Punch
Florist: Cupboard
Cake: Whole Foods
Caterer: The Cotton Room
Hair/Makeup: Wedding Hair by Liz
Videographer: Dogwood Media
Coordinators: Michelle Alred and Heather Schaffran
Photobooth Prop Extraordinaire: Princess Sazzy – (this is still a joke about our cat…but we really do have a fathead of her in the photobooth)

Elizabeth+Rich // A Durham Food Tour Wedding

These guys are my favorite beard+pixie cut combo besides ourselves. They are us, but they’re way smarter and can lift heavier things. They also have a dog and live in South Carolina. Everything else is exactly the same. I’d adopt them if I could, or be adopted by them, or at the very least sew ourselves into one giant footie pajama and walk around together all the time. They are Elizabeth+Rich, and there they are on their engagement session when we first met them. Now they are back and getting married. And, of course, they had the absolutely brilliant idea of turning it into a food tour wedding. They really like food and food tours and so why not have 30ish of their closest peeps and family get together in Durham for a food tour wedding? THERE IS NOT REASON NOT TO DO THIS.

They were married at The Boiler Room in the American Tobacco Campus among a lot of industrial pipes. Then we went outside and Elizabeth educated us about how the land is moving so that’s why the tiny door at the ATC campus fake lunch counter is so tiny. There was a complicated, sciencey name for this that I’v since forgotten, but it was neat. Then we went to Bull City Burger and I ate a pimento cheese burger and fries while almost crying with appreciation (everyone loves pimento cheese). We all moved on to Alley 26 where there were cocktails and cheer and a fancy salad. Next stop was The Durham where they rented the rooftop and had a bunch of apps including the dozen or so deviled eggs that I ate entirely by myself. We all admired the view of a chilly downtown Durham from the roof, all decked out for the holidays. Then we all walked to the infamous bull (since you have to show people from out of town, it is practically a requirement), and onto Criterion from there where there was cake and coffee and sparklers. It was one of the most darling and endearing weddings we’ve ever had the pleasure to shoot. Chill, calm, friendly, and fun. A most miraculous way to end the year. Congratulations, Elizabeth and Rich, and onward to 2019!


Date: December 16, 2018
Ceremony Venue: The Boiler Room // Durham, NC
Food Tour Stops: Bull City Burger and Brewery, Alley 26, The Durham, and Criterion
First Dance Song: “You for Me” – Blossom Dearie
Rich’s Occupation: Mechanical Engineer, Professor of Physics at Coastal Carolina University
Elizabeth’s Occupation: Professor of Art History at Coastal Carolina University
How You Met: The old-fashioned way: through mutual friends (Ted & Jillian, our witnesses!) at a dinner party in Manhattan (in 2011!)
Interesting Fact: We can’t think of anything, so here is some random trivia: We have an almost 16-year-old mutt named Riesling who is probably curled up on the sofa under a blanket right now. E’s brother and sister-in-law are flying in from Bosnia for the wedding. They win. R used to drive big-rig trucks while he was in college. E was a cheerleader in high school and was voted “most spirited” in her senior class (she still gets 5/5 every semester from her students in the category “enthusiasm for the subject matter”). E spills things (a lot)… there’s a really funny story about our second date. Oh, and neither of us were sure that our first date was actually a date when we planned it. But it was. After it was over, E was so smitten she walked 10 blocks in the wrong direction before she noticed she was going the wrong way.
Honeymoon: Since adventure travel is the norm for us, we thought we’d do something out of the ordinary. We are spending a week at a destination spa in Santa Fe, NM, for all the yoga, cooking classes, and massages we can stand!
Officiant: John Baltes (E’s brother)
Ceremony Music: Tim Fischer (friend)
Florist: Mahtab Pedrami (friend)
Cake: Mad Hatter’s
Caterer: Taste Carolina Gourmet Food Tours
Hair/Makeup: Rock, Paper, Scissors