When it comes to post-custody family photos, there is one rule we follow: what the child says goes. If they’re tired, we take things slow. If they want to play, we play for a while. There’s nothing quite like the paths of Changdeokgung for little boys to play in. There are open spaces, ramps that go up and down through gates, and, of course, pebbles and rocks everywhere. At this session, we certainly got our fair share of running through gates and picking up rocks done. In between, we squeezed in some beautiful moments of interaction.
We spent our first few minutes together with one goal in mind, get a portrait of the whole family looking my way. It’s always best to start this way since when children get tired, all bets are off. As is the case with most toddlers, today’s little man, who we’re going to call “Little Koala” as his parents do, was not going to sit still and hold a conversation with me. It was a simple case of getting him to have enough fun that I could coax moments from him. In the end, that’s really all we need and it keeps things fun.
In the spirit of keeping things fun, we continued with a swing and allowed him to entertain his love for pebbles for a while. That also helped distract him from his curiosity about the sheer drops we find around the palace grounds. Boys will be boys! With a few nice images of this in the bag, we decided to switch up the location to somewhere without so many pebbles on the ground. Little did we know what was coming.
Getting to our next location, we managed to get some fun shots of the family running along together. It was clear that the Little Koala was getting tired at this point. We wouldn’t have much longer together. Or so we thought. We soon discovered the biggest rock we’d found so far. All efforts to put this down and work how the adults wanted to were met with a firm “no”. So we decided to keep the rock as the star of the show. It was all we could do to keep it from being gnawed on! Even with this joyful new find, it wasn’t long before we needed a snack and a nap, which brought us to the end of the session.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this session with the Liu family. Please do reach out if you’re interested in having your own family photos made in Seoul or anywhere else across Korea. Also, don’t forget to follow my Instagram and Facebook for more family photography.
