Cleon & Clara – Winter Proposal Photography in Seoul

Today’s proposal story is one of those ones that truly represents Seoul and the need to be flexible with changing conditions. Seoul threw everything it could at us to ensure the lead-up to this was filled with surprises. Living here, I’m quite used to things going sideways at the last minute, but I can imagine that there must have been moments when Cleon was a little worried about the outcome! But, before we get into that, let’s go back to the beginning of the story, Cleon’s enquiry about having his proposal photographed.

Cleon’s initial email was filled with details about their rough plans for their trip and plenty of questions for me about what might be possible given the things they liked and what he thought would make it the perfect day. Clara, his partner, had been to Korea before, but this would be Cleon’s first time and he was drawing from her past experiences to share what he thought might work. She had loved biking along the Han River at sunset (an activity I can definitely get behind!). He thought this might give them a great way to get to a quieter spot where there wouldn’t be many people around. Perfect! I threw a couple of ideas into the mix and we settled on a spot. However, we began this discussion nearly four months prior to their visit, so things would look very different by that time. We decided to hold off on the final decision until much closer to the date.

I knew things would look a little different at the end of autumn than they did in summer, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how different. If I recall correctly, the word Cleon used after seeing the scene at this time was “dystopian.” I would say that’s a perfect description for Seoul as winter approaches! We had planned for a sunset proposal leading into night. That way we could capture the last of the day’s light and then some of the sparkling city reflected in the river as night fell. Even the beautiful afternoon light, though, couldn’t bring the scene to life at that time of year. So, we pivoted to using Seoul Forest Park with its beautiful areas of Eulalia grass and final leaves of autumn.

We settled on a final location, I shared a plan with Cleon on how to get to his chosen spot and make it all work perfectly. Then, Seoul did what it is wont to do and the sunny forecast changed to light snow a couple of days before. That could make things quite beautiful with falling snowflakes and the remaining autumn leaves. In the end, we decided to keep our morning shoot time and see how the weather panned out. On the afternoon before our shoot, the forecast went from light snow to full-on snowstorm and I watched out the window of my apartment as the snow began to pile up.

The following morning, I made the journey over to Seoul Forest well in advance of our shoot as I knew that conditions would have changed significantly. In fact, our original location was gone! The snow was the heavy and wet kind and had simply crushed the Eulalia grasses into the ground. Many of the trees were also bent over under the weight of the snow. I quickly darted around the park and found several alternatives for Cleon, texting them to him and getting his feedback before making a new plan to share with him. We got everything sorted just in the nick of time and we made our final plans as the couple walked into the park.

Just to be clear, the images you see above were photographed in November! It wasn’t even winter yet and we’d been having an extremely warm autumn up until this point. Checking the news that afternoon, this actually turned out to be the heaviest snow on record for November, which usually only sees the occasional dusting once every few years. What a wonderful day for a proposal. Little did we know, it was about to get more beautiful.

Following the proposal, we slowly walked around the park, making the most of the fresh snow. Especially in the city, beautiful white snow typically only lasts a few hours before it gets trampled into mud, mixed with pollution, or frozen into sheets of ice if the temperature drops rapidly. So, Cleon and Clara had the absolute perfect timing for their shoot.

As you can see from the first image above, we had a couple of breaks in the clouds that let the beautiful morning light through. In fact, the forecast said that we’d have clear skies from around 10 AM. Remember what happened with the forecast above? Well, it happened again. The skies opened up, for sure. But, it wasn’t clouds parting. The snow began to fall quite heavily again. I immediately felt like we were in a scene from Iwai Shunji’s “Love Letter” and that really helped to bring the scene to life.

Now, I could have continued shooting in these conditions all day long. But, I began to feel that my equatorial friends, Cleon and Clara, might start to lose their extremities if we went on much longer! So, I pointed them in the direction of a lovely warm cafe and we called this final image the last frame of our serendipitously gorgeous morning. A big thanks to Cleon for taking a chance on the weather and a big thanks to Clara for saying “yes” so we could make some beautiful images on this unique morning. Wishing you all the best!