Weddings in North Carolina

I made this for my daughter, but I may as well share it!

Shocked at the idea of spending thousands of dollars on a photographer for my daughter’s wedding, I looked on Craig’s List under services today for moderately-priced options. I was also looking for photographers who would provide copyright-free cds/dvds of the digital images.

Success! Note that I have not met or spoken with any of the photo studio folks below, but I liked the images on their websites. Each of them has a relatively low-cost package which includes a cd of your images so you can print away to your heart’s content.

I’ve decided that from now on I will feature on this blog only photographers with wedding options under $2,000 which include a cd/dvd of images which can be printed freely by the customer. If you qualify, or know a good photographer who does, please be in touch with me!

• Bennett Weddings

  Don’t let some photographer own all your wedding pictures, charging you exorbitant prices every time you want to print one! With my wedding packages, YOU OWN ALL THE PHOTOS – You can print as many as you want, whenever you want!

  I came to wedding photography through my experiences as a photojournalist. Twelve years in the newspaper business taught me to see things differently – and that comes through in my wedding photos.

  Ceremony & Reception Coverage (5 hours) $800

• Carl Johnson Photography

  Warning: Flash and automatic music

  Wedding special: Up to 3 hours of wedding coverage plus (limited time) free engagement session
  250+ images on a cd: $545 (regularly $629)

• Infantino Photography

  Photography Packages include “The Ruby” – 3 hours of photography coverage, over 250 images taken, high Resolution photo CD of all images (you receive copyrights to print all photos on CD) = $500. Additional Hour of Photography – $105.00

• Robert F. Filcsik Photography

  Warning: Flash and automatic music

  I like his images very much. He says “Offering modern and creative photojournalistic style photography at an affordable price. Wedding packages start at $600. 4 Hours coverage, including CD with edited high resolution images and the copyrights for all images.” The number of images is quite limited, however.

• Andrew Gloc Photography

  Gloc appears to be a newcomer to the business; he doesn’t have much of a wedding portfolio, but I liked the images I saw. He says: “I charge $299 for 4 hours of shooting including a cd of all images.”

The Inn at Celebrity Dairy (I used to think its name was the Celebrity Goat Farm) has some real advantages. It’s a lovely spot, and the food is fabulous. (I didn’t take the pictures in this post, I found them.)

The people who run the place are friend, intelligent, and accommodating.

I wrote about the place in 2005 after we did a wedding there:

We did a unexpectedly lovely wedding at the Celebrity Goat Farm in Pittsboro (to your right, an actual Celebrity Goatlet, picture by Gerry). They didn’t tell us whether this was a celebrity farm for ordinary goats, or an ordinary farm for celebrity goats.

Anyway, I would direct you to their website, but they don’t have one. [Now they do: The Inn at Celebrity Dairy.] They sell great (and very expensive) goat cheese and also hats that say “Celebrity Goat Farm” and you would be the only one on your block to own one.

The Inn at the Celebrity Dairy

The guy that owns the farm and the 60 goats has a nice B&B there (except there’s that smell of 60 goats) and is a GREAT cook and puts on weddings.

We mostly do non-mainstream weddings, specializing in “More-or-less Traditional Music from the Northern Hemisphere and the Previous Millennium” as we do. (When we started it was the Current Millennium, but then Y2K happened and we had to order new business cards.) That means if somebody Scottish is marrying somebody Jewish, they can Google “Scottish Jewish Wedding” and our band will pop up on the screen.

So this was a Polish Russian wedding but they wanted medieval music for the prelude. Just our kind of gig. When we got there the bride and groom were sweeping the floor and setting up chairs but they soon disappeared and changed into their lovely garb. They had made their own outfits, sort of SCA-esque with flowing sleeves and wreaths, and the bridegroom had sewn himself a green velour Russian sort of tunic. It was a Unitarian Universalist ceremony, candles and stuff. A Unitarian minister once told me Unitarians don’t consider themselves Christians since they don’t believe in God, I hadn’t known that.

Afterwards we played oboreks and mazurkas and waltzes and everybody danced, young and old, mostly dances they were making up on the spot, and the food was absolutely wonderful. For once, instead of lurking in the back we sat at the banquet table with the bride and groom and their parents and got treated like royalty. At a goat farm. Isn’t life good?

A possible disadvantage is revealed in this quote from their publicity: “Just a few steps from the Inn you’ll find the ‘Goat Hilton’ – home to the Celebrity Goat Dairy herd of 100 Alpine and Saanen goats.” Depending on the wind…