When I was charged with photographing this super sweet family, I was warned that the kids were fast. Like, super fast. I’m pretty used to fast kids but CAITI WAS RIGHT, THEY WERE SO FAST. Particularly Max, who was like photographing a bird, and sometimes he was in the frame and sometimes just kind of blurrily passing through it. But I adore photographing speedy children – they add a quality of movement and spontaneity that’s the whole reason I love photographing families. Max, the super fast older brother, lives at home with his chill, kind parents Caiti and Lou and his younger brother Leo. Leo is an adorable, adorable, adorable little mane of crazy blonde hair and a bit of a mischievous smile. Max is friendly, silly, and clearly destined for track and field. Together the brothers love having fun together. They play with trains, attempt to pet the cats (Monkey and Business… amazing cat names), play on their jungle gym in the backyard, and throw rocks in the creek. They warmed up to photos quickly and I’m fairly certain they’ll be excellent Carolyn Scott Photography interns in the future.
You guys, I love Janice. I’ve known her for a long time now, and I love her more each time I see her if that’s even possible. She’s a truly wonderful bright ball of happy, adorable energy and also a seriously standup person. She knows exactly what Big Dog Little Bed Productions, her videography company, stands for, and she knows exactly how she wants her business to be run, and exactly how she wants her employees to feel. She’s quite serious about having fun at all times while telling the stories of others to best represent them. If you asked, she would 100% be able to confidently tell you her goals and ambitions for her business and they’d all be the most authentically authentic goals you’ve ever heard. She’s a sincere person, and the funnest. Yes, the funnest. She likes Dad glasses and beer and dogs and sewing (she made her black and white top for this shoot!) and everyone likes her. Other people that like her enough to have helped us out for this shoot include Tyler and Yuri, two talented videography members of her team, as well as Madison and Amelia who let us capture some client meeting/work photos. Also in a constant role of support is Murphy the dog, always hanging around for treats and meetings but slightly belligerent when it comes to posed photos. Happy to have shot my third small business branding photos for Big Dog Little Bed!
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.