Tag: weddings

  • a fresh start

    a fresh start

    It is booking season again– at least it is at Caroline Price Photography! 

    I started a Facebook ad on July 5 or 6 and it has been super-successful— I am so pleased to have talked to some wonderful new brides! And I am thrilled to be there for their big days! 

    The ad won’t be continuous, and my rates are likely to change after August or so, for any bookings after the end of August. I’m so glad I can give a lot of folks some great pricing, but it won’t be sustainable long-term for the business. 

    I am nearly at capacity for 2024! I have room for 2-3 more weddings left on my calendar then I will stop taking 2024 weddings. And 2025 capacity is looking like it is going to fill sometime in the next month or so, as well!

    My heart is full, as always. I LOVE my clients. 

    On the personal front:

    Colorado was a very nice break, with some drives in the evenings in the mountains and website work during the day at the hotel. 

    I missed my “smile” anniversary with Jared. For those of you who don’t know us in person— we met on a dating website, and that site allowed you to send “smiles” to people you were interested in. Jared sent one to me on June 30, 2003, and I sent one back that July 1. I mark it every year, except this one, apparently. Maybe 20 years was my capacity for remembering the smaller anniversaries like clockwork. 

    Jared says he didn’t miss it, but I don’t remember him saying anything to me about it. Oh well. 

    Porter, our oldest son, will move into his dorms at Georgia State to prepare for band camp in mid-August. As I have said in multiple places, I am not ready. I am not ready to have my heart split in multiple places. But I know this will be good for him, and I know he’s going to be fine and do very well. And, I am thrilled he will be a philosophy major. That department treated me very well in my religious studies program and I know he’s going to enjoy it. And bonus— he exempted out of all the English and math classes he would need due to IB and AP scores, so if all goes well he’ll be a sophomore at the end of his first semester. And, he hasn’t ruled out the 5-year BA/JD program. I don’t know how I feel about the idea of one of my children becoming a lawyer, but he’s been interested it at least the entirety of his high school career. Regardless of what he decides to do, I am a super-proud Mama.

    Liam is starting the college tours at the end of July! Up first will be Georgia State and UGA. He’s got Kennesaw State, West GA, and GA Tech also on his list to check out, but we couldn’t schedule any of them before school starts so those will wait until later. He’s my pragmatic child, so he’s unlikely to find any of the private liberal arts type schools interesting, looking in favor instead to what will be the best financial decision college-wise.

    I am drafting this while I am sitting at the city pool with Oliver; I’m so glad he loves to swim and loves to jump off the diving boards. Today, there happen to be friends from school he knows and I am glad about that. He’s big into flight simulators at the moment and we just got him registered a week or so ago for Aviation Challenge next summer in Huntsville. But, he’s going to have to prove to us that he can eat school lunch this year before he can go since we can’t send food— he’s a picky eater like me and Porter. 

    Somehow, coming home from vacation in Colorado has felt like a fresh start. It had been since 2018 that we had been anywhere close to that far west. 

    I told Jared I could live in the Denver area if he ever wanted to look for employment out that way. I know he’s leery of taking me that far away from Atlanta, though. And Liam has two years left of high school and Porter will be in school in Atlanta, so it’s a really bad idea. But those mountains are gorgeous and I do not get the land-locked feeling that I got when we lived in Iowa, with the mountains close by. I know Jared would love to live in Colorado— I know it’s his favorite place he ever lived— but I know he won’t do it, because of us. 

    That’s all for now.

    Love, Caroline

  • my 40th wedding

    my 40th wedding

    My 40th Wedding — I shot my 40th wedding on Sunday, seven years and six days after my first solo wedding.

    Prior to that first solo wedding, I had shadowed/ second shot precisely one wedding. And at that wedding, I mostly learned exactly what I didn’t want to do/ how I didn’t want to treat my brides and their families.

    Sunday’s wedding was hectic, but very well organized and a morning wedding, just like my own wedding to Jared was. My arrival time was 6:45 am, but the exit ended up being around 1:30 pm and I was free to go.

    Those of you who have known me for any length of time know that I go through phases with shooting weddings and the photography business. I am not shutting down the photography business, but I am re-thinking my relationship to weddings. It might be awfully nice to go out on a high note.

    The dream was only to ever shoot a single wedding, just to say I had done it. But I refused to do it at all without being a legitimate business, with the LLC, and the business license, and the insurance, etc. I knew enough from my legal issues in photography class at Emory Continuing Ed to know better than to do it any other way.

    And here I am, seven years and six days after that first wedding, and that dream of wanting to shoot a single wedding has turned into 40 weddings under my belt. I know to a lot of my photog friends 40 weddings is not a lot at all in that time span, but to this girl it has been plenty.

    My 40th Wedding and a Full Heart

    40 weddings, and I’ve only missed a single kiss and that was because the kiss literally didn’t happen at all. And there have been some really, really fast kisses.

    I’ve only given one refund and that was to someone who really didn’t deserve one, probably the wedding I worked the hardest at, but I was too afraid of a frivolous bad review and figured if they needed the money badly enough to raise complaints that weren’t even really legitimate, then they needed the money more badly than I did. They even got their USB drive of their pictures anyway.

    My 40th Wedding

    I’ve steamed dresses, served as coordinator and photographer, shot weddings as far as over 125 miles away, shot at Big Canoe and Lake Lanier (Lake Lanier was my third wedding!), shot at countless small barn venues. I’ve calmed down brides, I’ve calmed down mother-of-the-brides. Just Sunday I climbed the tiniest but fairly tall metal spiral staircase not meant to be climbed by anybody but maintenance, to get a stained glass window shot of the bride in her dress, and told Shelley as I was climbing down it was definitely something my orthopedic surgeon would have advised against doing. I’ve shlepped it across hot fields in the middle of summer to get between a brides’ getting ready room and a groom’s getting ready room. I’ve shot in the pouring down rain. I’ve driven 3 hours to a wedding, shot a ten-hour wedding day, and then driven the 3 hours home again.

    40 weddings, and my heart is full. Back when I started dreaming of photographing a wedding, I thought I could only be really good at photographing inanimate, sentimental objects around my house, or landscape shots around town. And to think, the dream was only ever to shoot a single wedding just to say I had done it. And here I am, 40 weddings and quite a few five-star reviews later.