Category: Personal

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.

Ahh, the annual culmination of embarrassing photos of ourselves all in one place. We look terrible or confused or hangry, and are occasionally seen straddling logs in the middle of streams or getting caught in gym equipment. We are always, always, always pointing out in vague directions, gesticulating wildly, or petting dogs. I also decided to add an always-smooth-looking fannypack to my arsenal of wearable camera gear this year, so now I look like I’m ready for a week long trek in the wilderness after I’m done rock climbing. Not pictured this year: multiple pictures of Geoff eating wedding cake. I don’t know why. Maybe because I was able to eat more cake this year than ever before due to my gluten-free wedding guest brethren, so I was also busy eating cake at the same time? Either way, a disturbing lack of pictures of Geoff eating. I’ll work on that for next year. To make up for it, there is a picture of the Virginia Tech mascot hugging him against his will. Enjoy the stupid expressions and awkwardness of it all. To all of you who worry about how you’ll look in your pictures, we promise it won’t be this bad.

The “Making Fools of Ourselves” posts started in 2011 at the end of our Class of 2011 post. Here’s a look at younger versions of us:

2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011

Class of 2017.

Phew. Many of you know that this was a crap year for us. We had a significant death in the family, a laundry closet that was flooded, two cats in the emergency hospital, a computer that died, and a small kitchen fire that Carolyn valiantly extinguished… saving the lives of everyone in attendance. We blame 100% of the bad things that happened to us on a small wooden tiki carving we discovered under the dryer in said pre-flooded laundry closet, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, it sucked. We were hit with one thing after the other. But you know what didn’t suck? Our 2017 professional year. It ruled. Every single one of our clients was sane, kind, welcoming, pleasant, and fabulous in every way. We got hugs and thank you letters and toys for our cats and invitations to drinks and gatherings and copies of Hocus Pocus on DVD. You all took immense care of us this year when we needed it most, and we can’t thank you enough. You all were a very special class indeed, and we’re glad to see you graduate ::sheds tear::. I’m not sure where you’re graduating to… but… come back and visit us, please. We love each and every one of you. Thanks for making a bad year have tremendously good moments.

The year end “Class Of” posts date back to 2011.

2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011