Thursday, April 28, 2011

Busan e-FM Week 27: Baby Photo Shoots

The english waves come inAbout 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

Back in January I talked about the birth of my son in Korea, and how we named him. This week, I wanted to talk about another apparently important baby issue – baby photos.

Counting days

Part of the significance of these baby photos is to do with the way people count days here. Actually, I found that Koreans are obsessive counters of days, formally marking such occasions as 49 days after the death of a loved one, 15 days after Seollal with Jeongweol Daeboreum, and even more modern examples, such as burning a wedding bouquet after 100 days to ensure a trouble-free marriage. Some of it is really quite inconvenient too – I used to live in Hadan, where there was a ‘Five Days Market’ - which occurs every five days, so basically you never know when to go. It would be a lot easier if it happened every Wednesday, for example.

We don’t count days a lot in England. Of course, we’re generally really bad at maths, so that wouldn't help. I find it especially confusing here because it’s not just the normal calendar you have to contend with, but also the lunar calendar. I don’t know how Koreans manage it – but maybe there’s a smartphone app that helps you with it all these days.

Apparently there’s not much counting with marriage though – when I asked my wife about it she told me “once you get married you tend not to celebrate any more” - isn’t that the truth? But babies are a different matter.

50 days

We had a few shots taken with a photographer for our baby’s 50th day, although it felt quite informal. At the time I didn’t think much of it because I thought it was part of the baby package that we’d bought through the hospital for my wife’s birth.

100 days

So we counted the 100th day for our baby, when I gathered photos must be taken. But evidently there’s more to it than this, because my wife started browsing the Internet intently for baby things, and making a lot of phone calls. Packages began to arrive. By the time the day came we had a big banner across the wall with my son’s name on it plus the words “Happy 100th Day”. And surrounding it we had the world’s entire supply of purple balloons. Then there was a cake with candles for ‘100’, which was surrounded by dishes of fruit, and of course, I had to take the photos.

So I figure we're done here right? Wrong. These were not the official 100th day photographs. No, we still had to go to a studio – except on the 130th day, because apparently this is when the baby ‘looks better’. I’m told it’s not uncommon, but then it’s all a lie really isn’t it?

130 days

So for the 130th day 100th day photo shoot we hired a studio, which was basically a big room split into six different themes with various props. And I took along my DSLR to take the photos. You can hire a camera, but this probably isn’t a good idea because most DSLRs – especially the high end ones – can take a lot of getting used to. I know a lot of men don’t mind fiddling around with their equipment, but trust me, you don’t want to be doing this against the clock, in-between bouts of baby and partner screaming, depending on the quality of the results.

It was quite stressful, and I hadn’t worked with big studio flash-lights before. Plus I had to keep an eye on what was going to be in the background to each shot, because the props were sometimes a little odd. Fortunately I noticed the words “Adolph Hitler” on the spine of a book in the background of one photo before I took it. These are probably not the words you want floating around above your baby's head in the family album.

Of course, the advantage of the self-studio is that you can take all the shots you want, but the downside is that you probably can’t take all the shots that your partner demands. And it gives you freedom, but the freedom to mess things up. So the next day it was my partner’s face that was the picture – she said only five shots were worth saving out of the 554 I took. For what it’s worth I saved 94 of the photos, but clearly it’s debatable whether it’s worth the stress; there’s something to be said for going down the professional route, rather than apparently as it was in our case, the unprofessional route.

200 days

So I thought, well, thank God I don’t have to do that again. And then my wife said to me “We have to do another photo-shoot on the 200th day”. No. You know, I do like this country, but sometimes it feels like a nightmare I can’t escape from.

The 200th day photo-shoot was booked, and my wife wanted to do another self-shoot, but I caught a break, at least, I think I did. My wife entered our baby’s photo into a photo competition run by a large studio here, and we won a free photo-shoot with a photographer.

In fact, my wife’s been entering our son into a few competitions. I think it’s very Korean behaviour, but being British I have reservations about the whole thing, because it just seems quite presumptuous to think your baby looks nice, especially when I look at myself in the mirror and think that if he does it can’t be from my genes. But it seems to be a very serious business in Korea – there was a national competition on an Internet site here, and when the last ten were announced, hundreds of mothers were so disappointed by the exclusion of their baby that they were posting lots of angry messages on the site, with levels of rhetoric almost approaching that of North Korea. I half-expected them to threaten to destroy the site in a sea of fire.

So it was quite a relief – in a way – to just be a bystander at the photo-shoot we won. Except there’s still some stress, because our baby was full of smiles before the shoot, and as soon as it started, he wouldn’t smile, and he began to cry. He did get better - but it helps to understand Korean, because eventually I discovered the photographer was complaining that he was smiling too much. Apparently the ‘concept’ was ‘being moody’. I don’t know why there has to be a concept, but there was. It seems they wanted to highlight his big eyes – and if he smiled, his eyes weren’t as big. But anyway, the photos are better than mine.

365 days

But remember I mentioned that before the competition win, we’d originally booked the self-studio for his 200th day shoot? My wife re-arranged it... for his 1-year shoot.

[to be continued...]

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-04-27 @ ~19:30

4 comments:

Anthony said...

We're both American with a little one in Korea, so I am glad we didn't have to go through that! It sounds confusing, expensive, and stressful. Can you recommend a good (and decently-priced) photographer in Busan?

How can I learn about these photo competitions too? Having a completely foreign baby in Korea (blonde hair, blue eyes) literally draws crowds, which makes me think she has something (which I don't!).

Mike said...

Hi Anthony,

The studio where a photographer did our baby's 200th day shoot is 'Studio Bloom' near Kyungsung National University subway station, and I think his work was good, but I'm not the best judge of artistic quality and I'm not sure there's any guarantee that you'll be getting the same photographer if you go there. My experience is that sometimes these places are owned by the photographer themselves, and sometimes they’re just businesses that bring in freelancers and it’s something of a revolving door. In fact my friends had a problem with their wedding shoot under the latter circumstances, and the studio just had them come back, providing another photographer.

As far as price is concerned, it's not a particularly cheap place I think, but not outrageously expensive either.

You're probably right about the rarity of your baby in Korea so I think she's probably highly marketable if you decide to go down that road. If you do though, I’d just say be sensible about your baby’s security. Baby competitions and the desire for child stardom are activities which are taken extremely seriously in Korea, and both my wife and mother-in-law said that if our baby ever participated in something which led off-line, we’d have to be careful not to take our eye off him around any of the other mothers. That sounds a little ridiculous, and yet having seen the hysterical rantings of women online whose babies haven’t made the finals of competitions, it has left me with a lingering doubt as to their mental states and just how far they would go to win.

Anthony said...

Thanks for the information!

I had no clue baby competitions could be so cut-throat. "We’d have to be careful not to take our eye off him around any of the other mothers." That line scared me. What would they do?

Mike said...

I gathered that other mothers might not be above pinching a rival baby when you're not looking to make them cry and look more effort to work with. But I think it's supposition rather than based on any evidence of this happening. On the other hand, reading the comments of mothers online makes me think anything may be possible.

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