We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Katee O’Brien & Caroline King a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Katee & Caroline, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
We both have backgrounds in media from both sides of the camera. Caroline studied media production at UNC and Katee had a career in modeling after college. We fine tuned our wedding photography skills through mentorships with other photographers and online classes and tutorials. We then second shot many weddings and attended styled shoots, but we still learn the most through our own experience shooting every weekend. When we started our photography business we took every shooting opportunity that came our way. We both are our hardest critics. We are constantly looking to learn/study and improve our craft. Our extreme competitiveness to be the best keeps us motivated. Knowing what we know now, we would have reached out to a mentor right away instead of 6 months into our business. We wouldn’t be where we are today without the support and guidance from our mentor, now friend and teammate Shelby aka Thistle Wood Photo. We believe community is EXTREMELY important in the wedding photography industry. Surrounding ourselves with other positive, creative friends keeps us motivated and inspired! Our fear of getting started and putting ourselves out there was definitely an obstacle that stood in our way of starting sooner, but the biggest obstacle that stood in our way was time. When we first launched our business we both had other careers which gave us comfort and stability. It took a while to take the leap of faith into the uncomfortable, going full-time, but we did our business really took off!
Katee & Caroline, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
We are a wedding photography duo based out of Atlanta, Georgia. We are best friends and business partners passionate about capturing photos that you can feel. Our love of color, cities, flowers, and warm weather inspires our colorful rich editing style and happy photos. Both as hobbyist photographers for years before starting our business, we loved and still love traveling to new places and our favorite thing to do is location scouting the coolest photo spots! We were always drawn to photographing people over landscapes and capturing emotional candids from couples in love. Wedding photographers that document stories and emotion through their work are who admire and thrive to be like this profession. In 2020, while we were documenting weddings we realized the value of having a team, two sets of creative eyes, four cameras, and complementary skill sets. This is when Katee + Caroline Photography partnership was born. We believe what sets us apart is that we are two lead photographers, bffs, and we work every wedding together. There are a lot of spontaneous moments with many moving parts throughout a wedding day, this is a huge advantage that either one of us can step in, lead, and capture any moment confidently. We put our hearts and souls into documenting each wedding authentically because no couple or love story is the same!
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
We met in 2018 in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Our boyfriends, now husbands, are best friends and doubles partners! We both went to Mexico to cheer them on in their professional tennis tournament but of course both brought our cameras with us! Little did we know this trip would soon change our future and career path. We met, instantly connected over our passions of photography, travel, tacos, and the rest is history! We started our photography business together two years later and often joke with our guys that we might even be closer than they are now!
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Thankfully, we both were on the same page from the very beginning! We knew when starting our wedding photography business that having all the quality equipment needed was extremely important and the priority to be able to serve our clients well. For the first 6 months, all of our photography income went directly back into our business. Starting out part-time helped us be able to invest into our business without affecting our livelihood. After 6 months, we felt like we had all the equipment needed and were fully prepared to leave our current careers and dive into full-time photography! Best decision we ever made!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.kateecarolinephotography.com
- Instagram: @kateecarolinephotography
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/kateecarolinephotography
Image Credits
Katee Caroline Photography @kateecarolinephotography