Working with families multiple times is always a joy. It’s something I don’t get to do all that often as most of my sessions are booked from abroad by families visiting Korea. Even rarer than that would be back-to-back sessions with an adoptive family!
Betsy reached out as her family was coming for their first pre-custody visits with their new son, Peter. She wanted to have two sessions, much like my previous family shoot with the Sensenig family. The first session would be with her three oldest children, who would not be coming on the second trip for custody of their youngest sibling. The idea was to create two sessions worth of photos that could be spliced together to show all members of the family.
Our first shoot definitely set the tone for the second shoot. The three older children were all about having a fun time and getting each other laughing hard. It’s great to see siblings who get along so well firing each other up and taking every shot I have planned in a completely unexpected direction. When we found our flow together, the children and I began to swap ideas and make the session more than the sum of its parts.
How would the second session fit into this one? We had an unknown personality about to join the family and a distinct lack of the three big personalities from the first session. It ended up being just fine, it turned out!
We began our photo shoot with plenty of fun to get the little man warmed up. Keeping the energy high, we skipped from location to location, hitting every spot we had in the previous session. In each spot, we played to the reduced number of people and gave all of our energy to keeping Peter in the game with us.
As is often the case with post-custody sessions, the little man eventually let us know that he wasn’t going to play our games any more and that a snack was definitely in order. We headed over to the cafe in the palace and ordered up an apple juice for him that brought him straight back to life and gave us a few unique images along the way. Not only that, but it bought us a few more minutes to work once we headed back outside.
With a couple more shots in the bag, we called the session a success and began our march back toward the gate. Not more than a few steps in, we completely lost Peter to the land of nod and we knew we’d made the right decision. If you’ve enjoyed this session, please also follow my Instagram for additional updates and feel free to reach out if you’d like to have your own family photos in Korea.