Durham Family Photographer

Carolyn Scott is a Durham family photographer. She specializes in candid and documentary at-home family photography in the Triangle area (Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Cary, etc). Carolyn’s work has been published in several popular books and magazines, including Apartment Therapy, BuzzFeed, and Fangoria. Locally, she’s been voted Best Photographer in Durham Magazine’s Best Of Durham and INDY Week’s Best of the Triangle. She lives in South Durham with her husband Geoff and three cats.

We welcome this awesome family to North Carolina from upstate New York with open arms! They are a pretty rad addition to the area and we’re happy to help them come in from the snow. ;) We met them on a sunny weekend morning at their house to photograph them going about their usual business. They moved into the house with the idea of a complete renovation, and it’s become kind of a fun project for them (I’m not sure if they’d use the word “fun” as they’re doing the work themselves, but I kind of love house projects, so I say it looks like fun. Note: This is not an offer of free labor, Jessica and Ron). They’re doing the work as they go and wanted to document this part of their lives in transition, as well as their new move from the north. They’ve already built a pretty fabulous chicken coop in their yard for fresh eggs, and are making full use of the best tire swing ever in their beautifully wooded front yard.

This session gave us the opportunity to meet our first Bullmastiff clients, Lucy and Rudy, who are quite large but not at all fearsome. Lucy is the larger of the two, and she is Rudy’s aunt. Rudy, the “smaller” Bullmastiff, is 4 months old. Go ahead and look at him. He’s four. months. old. He’s already 75% of my bodyweight. Liam can ride the larger dog like a small horse. They’ve commandeered the two giant bean bag chairs in the family room that were meant for the kids, but they look really adorable sleeping in them so nobody cares. The kids are pretty great themselves and spend their time playing video games, wrestling the dogs, painting, and drawing. Lila, slightly unhappy with the candid direction of the shoot, took over the session at the end and started directing everyone into a variety of very dramatic poses in front of the fireplace. Look for her directorial movie debut in about fifteen years.

If you live in the Raleigh area you’ve surely picked up a copy of The Indy. And if you’ve read the Indy, you’ve probably seen an ad somewhere along the line that pictures a tiny floating head of a smiling woman giving humorous advice out of a speech bubble on a 1960s-esque funky background. Below everything reads “Jodi Foy – The World’s Nicest Dentist.” When we first moved to Raleigh, I saw another dentist exactly one time before I became captivated with Dr. Foy’s ads and told Geoff that we needed to switch to this woman who was claiming to be the world’s nicest dentist. Turns out that she is, indeed, the world’s nicest dentist, but she is also the world’s most hilarious dentist, the world’s most-into-photography dentist, and the world’s biggest champion of the Carolina Hurricanes dentist. We love her and all of her incredible staff (“The Foyettes). And if you need a new dentist, she has the official dentist CSP endorsement.

This was our first time turning the tables on our jobs and us working for Jodi and her beautiful family! Her husband is a super nice guy who is very close with their dog Winnie, who has been sick, and they wanted to document some of their life at home with him, their smaller and younger spitfire of a dog named Maci, and their boys Jack and Nicky. Jack and Nicky are incredibly polite and really nice kids who have two hobbies that seem to occupy 98% of their time and attention: hockey and anything involving Star Wars.  Jodi is an awesome hockey mom who takes them to practice and supports them at all their games (and takes a lot of fantastic photos!) while John plays with them in their driveway at home. Together, they are a really, really fabulous family. We’re so grateful we found her head floating around the Indy all those years ago. :)

Kevin+Elana+Elle // Newborn.

We were so happy to be reunited with our clients Kevin and Elana on a platform other than Facebook for the first time since we photographed their wedding in 2013! Not only did we get to see their beautiful and smiling faces again, we also got to meet a new beautiful and smiling face: that of their newborn daughter Elle. And if that’s still not enough for you, we also got to hang out with Elana’s mom who happens to be super cool and one of the committee heads of the CSP Fan Club. PLUS there were two black cats: Madison, who avoided us at all costs, and Brooklyn, who seemed to be under the mistaken but common cat impression that the crib was built specifically for her enjoyment. Brooklyn spent the session meowing incessantly at us. Madison spent the session running from us. Elana’s mom spent the session taking pictures of us taking pictures. Elle spent the session entirely awake except for 4 minutes and was totally suspicious of us. Kevin spent the session alternating between running his business, taking care of his wife and newborn, and trying to placate the cats. Elana spent the session looking gorgeous and put together despite having just had a child and remaining as calm and wonderful as ever.