Sensenig Family Photography – Changdeokgung, Seoul

Happy New Year, everyone! For my first blog of 2022, I want to share a rather unique family photography session from last year. It’s been an interesting couple of years for everyone, as I’m sure you’re acutely aware. Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say. So, when Brittany reached out about this pair of sessions, I was amazed by her creativity and excited to be a part of this time in their lives.

Travel restrictions have meant that several adoptive families I have worked with over the past couple of years have needed to make tough decisions about how they’ll travel and who will be able to come to Korea. The Sensenig family was no exception. When Brittany first reached out, she let me know their situation in full. They’d be making two trips to finalise this adoption. On the first trip, their two oldest children would join them to meet their little brother. However, on the second trip, they’d be staying home. Brittany wanted to have a final set of images from two separate shoots that could be meshed together into a single set.

I considered a few ways to go about this but in the end, landed on keeping the two sets sequential. I watned it to seem almost like the older children were taking a quick break and the youngest had just woken up from a nap. The Sensenigs were traveling just before autumn began and just after the peak. In total, there would be approximately a month between the two sessions. This change would mean different light, colours, and potentially a complete lack of foliage on the trees for the second session. I decided to plot a path through the palace that would work no matter the time of day or season. That way, we could keep the look of the two sessions fairly similar for the final set.

Shoot 1

One of the things the family wanted to take advantage of on this trip was the open access to Changdeokgung’s “Secret Garden.” So, we planned to begin our session right as the palace opened. Then, we would make our way to the Secret Garden when its gates opened if the children were still up for it. We began with a backward loop of the tour path, making a few stops at some of my favourite areas and giving the children breaks in between. With the stresses of meeting their little brother, international travel, and a bit of jetlag in the mix, our youngest members were worn out fairly quickly. Plenty of action kept them in the game just long enough for us to get what we needed, though.

Shoot 2

Just over a month later, I met up with the littlest man and his parents just after custody to add to this session. We took the exact opposite route around the set of buildings we’d used previously. Getting started, we knew this session was going to be a similar one to the previous one. We got some amazing bursts of energy from our little guy in the beginning. He enjoyed running, flying, and lots of peak-a-boo. But, it was all a bit much and he quietly let us know that he was ready to calm it down for a while. Family photography can be quite the roller coaster when it comes to young kids and sometimes we just have to let them take the lead.

The Secret Garden

During our first session, we’d wanted to get down to the secret garden. As a form of break time for the children, we did make the long walk down there following the first part of the first shoot. Although the sun was high by that time and the light a bit too harsh, we did find a couple of corners to make some special photos for the older children before their newest sibling joined the family.

Thank you for taking the time to view this blog. If you’d like to see more family photography from Seoul, you can find plenty of that on my family blog. On top of that, you can also follow my Facebook and Instagram accounts to know when new family photo sessions will be live here.