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.

Meei+William+LeXi+LeXuen // At Home Session.

Are my fellow American blog readers prepared to feel really inadequate when it comes to the number of languages you speak? Good! You’ve come to the right place. Meei contacted us a while back to do a family session with her husband and two daughters. They love the age of their girls and wanted to get it documented (and we agree; 1 and 3 are super fun ages!). We knew that Meei is Chinese, and we knew we’d have about a 5% chance of pronouncing her full name correctly, but she was super nice about our American handicap and told us to call her May. We also knew that her husband’s name was William, so we were 100% confident in our ability to pronounce his name (we were right!). But what we didn’t know is that William is actually Dominican! And William speaks Spanish and Meei speaks Chinese! They met while they were living in New York and they speak English to each other! And William speaks Spanish to the kids and Meei speaks Chinese to the kids and the kids respond in Spanish to their dad and Chinese to their mom and English at school and I’m sorry for all the exclamation points but this is so impressive to an American who took 6 years of French class and forgot everything! Holy smokes. We were and continue to be incredibly impressed by these trilingual kids and their parents. Such a cool family. The best part of our job is meeting people from all over the world and hearing about their experiences. So glad this family got to be our clients this year!

Katy+Mike+Lois // At Home Family Session

Katy and Mike are friends of ours through Kelly+Danny and Beth+David and also through their love of little mousey critters and Halloween. They love Halloween as much as we do, but are better at scary movies, so now they’ve taken us under their wing to introduce us to strange new things. Lois, their daughter, is going to be very well versed in the strange and unusual, but is already quite knowledgeable at how to be freaking adorable. Look at those plaid pants! Also, I think she’s one of maybe 5 toddlers under 2 on the planet with a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds poster in her play room. Also – a badass Edgar Allen Poe pillow. We think that Lois has a 99.5% chance of turning out to be the coolest kid ever but she also has a 0.5% chance of teenage rebellion that would involve listening to only boy bands and watching a lot of CBS shows. The odds are clearly in her favor to be super cool, but she also ripped up a comic in front of our eyes and seemed pleased while doing so, so we’re unclear on her motives just yet. It is certain, however, that she loves space and space helmets, so if she turned out to watch a lot of CSI we could probably forgive her if she’s an astronaut. In the meantime her parents will continually coach her on how to have really good taste in everything while coaching us on movies we haven’t heard of but will undoubtably love. We’ll take the opportunity to hang out with wonderful people and to slowly but surely steal all of their furniture and decor while they aren’t looking and load it into our hatchback over a long enough period of time that they won’t notice.

Vivi // At Four Years

The triumphant return of Vivi! This is our third year (year one, year two) documenting this adorable little girl as she runs around parks and picks up every stick she can find. We don’t pose her, but rather just follow her around as she picks up sticks, uses them as reindeer antlers, and then runs up a hill as fast as she can to find yet another stick. This year she recognized us and talked a ton, and I threatened to steal her cat boots on more than one occasion. I also showed her pictures of our cats on my phone because little kids are a great captive audience and I will talk to anyone willing to listen about our cats. She danced, played air guitar and jumped.

Vivi is less into turning every single doorknob this year, and more into hiding behind lamp posts. She still likes to make a run for all spots of potentially poisonous plants, but this year also added a literal hives of bees to her repertoire of things she really, really wants to play with. Vivi also finally gave us her opinions on Star Wars this year (she doesn’t like Chewbacca). However, her parents quickly debunked her statements (she does like Chewbacca). She buried a seed this year (I have no idea what was planted), and was curious about every bird house. Rocking chairs and porch steps are still a favorite (glad to see some things don’t change). Vivi is one of our very favorite clients, not only because the session can literally go anywhere Vivi takes us (it’s her world, we are just living in it), but also because it gives me much needed cardio since she runs full tilt for the majority of the time. THOSE CAT BOOTS THOUGH.