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.

Author Headshots for Anna Jean Mayhew

We have some incredibly talented members of the community in our area, and it never fails to fascinate me. Local Hillsborough author Anna Jean Mayhew (who goes by AJ to friends and family) is one of those talented people. She is 79 years old (these photos were coincidentally taken on her 79th birthday!), and was first published at the age of 71. She’s been writing since her 40s, and also held an incredibly varied career. One of her favorite past jobs was when she managed the opera in Charlotte, but she was also a court reporter where she picked up on an incredible gift she had for dialect. Her job as a court reporter helped shaped a lot of the ways her characters speak in her first book The Dry Grass of August (and I’d say it worked – her book is highly reviewed and rated on Amazon). Kensington, her publisher, offered her a two book deal, and her second book, Tomorrow’s Bread, will be out soon. She is absolutely fascinating. She is kind, outgoing, and has a penchant for wearing lots of jewelry and incredible glasses (her signature). She’s a fan of cats (and was quite accommodating when I needed to reschedule our session due to a sick kitty of our own), and traveling with her Swiss husband who is an expert on author Jules Verne. All of her family seems artistic and talented, and she worn earrings made by her sister, and a sweater and scarf made by another sister. It was a great honor (and a ton of fun) to go around Hillsborough with her, photographer her author headshots, and learn about her life. If I grow up to be half as accomplished and interesting as AJ, I’ll be set.

Promo – Rachael Bowman Photography

Rachael and Jared Bowman are the incredibly talented husband and wife photography team behind Rachael Bowman Photography, duo based in Raleigh but kicking ass everywhere. We were so excited to finally meet them in real life, and also nervousssssss (it’s hard not to be when you’re photographing someone so talented), but they are so nice and wonderfully welcoming that they put us instantly at ease (and it didn’t hurt that they had video games and Walking Dead comics). Our task was to photograph them hanging out in their house as a two-fold use for both family photos and promo pictures that they could use for their business showing their chill, laidback selves. This would, of course, involve their two fluffernutters Zoe (black lab) and Ellie (yorkie) whom we won over with an offering of cheese sticks. Later, still hungry, they did attempt to steal Rachael and Jared’s pizza, but I can’t blame them for trying. We all had a fabulous time bonding over photography related things, but also board games and all the Community paintball episodes. We also got a few new two-player video game recommendations out of the deal and have gotten them sucked into the marriage therapy/lessons in communication that is the game Overcooked. We love these guys and hope you get a feeling for their sweet life and home together. Please check out Rachael+Jared’s work! It is stunning and they’re rad people if we do say so ourselves.