Small wedding photography, Osteria Cotto

These photos were taken in Seoul, but I now shoot in Gyeongnam.

Hi, I’m author S.
Today I’d like to share some photos from a wedding day photo shoot. The shoot itself took place at Osteria Cotto in Apgujeong, Seoul. Seriously.. after one trip from Tongyeong to Seoul for a shoot, I’m practically passed out the next day.. If you call me, of course I’ll come, but bookings in Gyeongnam (South Gyeongsang Province) and Gyeongbuk (North Gyeongsang Province) are the easiest for me. I can shoot in Busan at the same price as Gyeongnam.
These days I also have business at an embassy and people to meet in Seoul, so when there’s a shoot in Seoul I combine the trips, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch. The price was different when I took these photos; I currently charge 500,000 KRW for wedding day photo shoots in Gyeongnam and Busan and 700,000 KRW in Seoul, which requires travel. I’ve only just come back to Korea, so I’m not planning to charge premium rates for the time being 😀

Right, let’s dive in.

Tap a photo to see it larger.
This was a small wedding and the couple asked for it, so I shot just three: the whole family, the groom’s side, and the bride’s side.
The traditional wedding day photo shoot follows a set format: the couple alone > with the groom’s parents > + the groom’s relatives > with the bride’s parents > + the bride’s relatives > immediate family > extended family too > coworker guests > a staged bouquet toss > a final staged shot of the dress.
That’s the format, and in the 13 years I was away from Korea, hardly anything had changed.

But a small wedding.. can be adjusted on request, and at a traditional wedding the formal group photos come at the very end of the ceremony, while at a small wedding I simply.. take them before the event starts. If coworkers and friends are included, I sometimes split them up: the family’s formal group photos before the event, and the coworkers and friends afterward.

So those three photos are all the formal group photos there are. A truly small wedding.

At a small wedding there are no staged shots to speak of.. but she’s wearing a lovely dress, so we still take a few simple ones. By the way, they’re a couple I photographed in Prague.. and they’re not fond of doing anything staged, so we did it really briefly and at top speed.

It’s a bit traditional.. but the space is cramped and guests keep arriving in the background and making eye contact with the couple, so I move even faster. So, something simple 😀

This one was taken again a little later, because there were so few photos of just the two of them..
Small wedding photos have a particular character.. in traditional Korean wedding day photos the couple are completely the stars, but at a small wedding the couple and all the guests are the stars. So the subjects are very varied.

You get lots of photos like this of greeting guests. Isn’t that what a small wedding is for in the first place?
Oh.. and.. there are no hired guests (people paid to show up as wedding guests) at a small wedding.
From the photographer’s side.. if the couple are really stiff as planks. Like wooden dolls, doing nothing, no reactions.. I try to create all sorts of situations, but I’d grab a friend and it turns out they’re a hired guest.. (sigh) Then things get a little awkward. I feel like I should shoot something lively, but now I have to play a guessing game about whether this person is a hired guest or not.. A small wedding has none of that. And you don’t have to worry about situations like “we know so few people on the groom’s and bride’s sides that holding a wedding feels embarrassing” either..

Among my own friends who’ve gotten married, the biggest worry for many of them was this: they’d worked their whole lives at a small company and knew few people, so they feared the guest list would be embarrassingly small compared with their wife’s. A small wedding has no such worry.

Family aside.. most of the guests’ faces are blurred. The actual photos are crisp.
My photos are very sharp. From the start I take care that a photo won’t look lower in quality even when viewed 20 or 30 years later.
Even with their faces blurred, you can tell the guests look cheerful and are smiling, right? I always help bring out smiles for the photos, so don’t worry. I don’t go around telling people to smile like an amateur xD

It’s great to fill the album with photos like these 😀
Do you really need separate formal group photos with coworkers and friends?
Please don’t hesitate to get in touch. If you’ve already booked a photographer, I can also work as a second shooter. Heck.. I can even do just the formal group photos. You might wonder if all my experience shooting overseas means I’m not so good at this kind of thing.. or would you? Anyway, until I left Korea in 2014, I was strutting around at a very well-known wedding day photography studio in Seoul.

There was a quick check on things during a lull in guest arrivals.
The flowers in front and behind were also prepared by the couple themselves. Originally they planned to put the big flower arrangement on the table and the table flowers behind, but a few days before the wedding they contacted me with a question about the flowers. I suggested putting the big arrangement behind, since the staff behind the counter don’t need to be photographed, so the staff at the bar wouldn’t show up.

Even with the big flowers there, the staff walk around hunched over like frail elderly people.. how much more would they have appeared in the photos without the flowers?

As I said earlier.. photos of the guests are very important at a small wedding, so I keep shooting what the guests are doing.

I deliberately erased the couple’s names and the date.
I don’t want anyone to be identifiable from these details. I’ve studied a fair bit of information security myself.. and the first thing I do every morning, the moment I wake up and open my eyes, is a site security check. I spend my time blocking the IP addresses of scraper bots and attackers trying to gain unauthorized access to the site. Information security as a way of life, always.

I also shoot things from the wedding day whenever I have a spare moment. You can get a sense of how fresh and pleasant the day felt.
I haven’t listed albums as a product yet, but if you’re putting one together yourself, slipping a photo like this into a corner of a page makes the album feel much fuller. If you’d like one, just order it during your booking consultation and I’ll make it for you. Albums aren’t that expensive either. The production cost of my albums starts at 64,000 KRW, but I sell them for 150,000 KRW -_-;;
Honestly, making albums is a bit of a hassle.. so the labor fee is high. You really don’t have to get one.

By 2013 I’d been to every well-known wedding hall in Seoul.. and at some point the studio started assigning me nothing but hotel weddings. At hotel shoots I photograph this kind of thing too: the tableware.. nothing special, but I also shoot what that day’s menu was, if there’s one.

Just my personal opinion.. but across countless wedding day shoots I’ve been fed plenty of meals, and the one I remember best is eating seolleongtang (beef bone soup) at the seolleongtang place right next to the church after a church ceremony.

Hmm.. someone who appears on TV came too. But I blurred them.

Ah, the mother is also on her second shoot with me.
Many of my clients are on their second or third shoot with me.

This Cotto has two entrances, and the other side is.. not pretty.. this side is pretty. But there’s a table?
I’m sorry to say that I asked four guests to wait on the other side for about 10 minutes. The side where the bride was standing is the entrance, so it’s very cramped. Luckily they kindly understood and I was able to shoot well.

As expected, plenty of guest photos.

Now the couple has to make their entrance, so we get ready. She hasn’t been wearing her veil, so she puts it on just before making her entrance.
A well-used, drapey veil definitely looks prettier than a new one.

They’re still getting ready inside.

Our emcee.

The fathers of both families didn’t do anything in particular, and only the mothers gave short congratulatory messages.
I suppose the fathers’ remarks were left out because a small wedding has more people speaking than a traditional one.

They were beautifully dressed in hanbok too 😀

In spare moments I shoot what the guests are up to. Of course, the photos delivered to clients have no blur.

At a small wedding the couple usually enter together, but they seem a little nervous 😀

The backlight is very intense. I still captured it well, though.

The couple and the emcee take turns speaking as the couple thank the guests. It’d be a bit awkward if just the two of them did it, right?

The videographer was there too, but they don’t show up in the photos at all, right?

Here are the guests photographing the couple.
The photos look nice because I shot and retouched them.. the room is lit by a mix of natural and indoor light right now, so the shooting conditions aren’t great.

Flowers I shot in a spare moment; I hear the couple prepared each of these themselves.

I want to go to the other side..
The backlight has completely washed out the bride’s face in this photo, hasn’t it? My habit is to take one shot where the bride’s face washes out and another where the groom’s does, then put the two together as a pair in the album.. but sometimes I can’t get to the other side because I’d get in the videographer’s way.

How many years was it again.. a friend of the bride’s for 20 years?
She read out various anecdotes, starting with the story of when they first met in their school days. I photographed the contents of the letter separately, but it’s a secret
Why did I blur this one -_-?

Of course there are photos of the children too 😀
By the way, I deliberately smooth out children’s skin tones quite a lot. I wipe away tiny blood vessels, moles, all of it. Because.. if a child’s original photo goes up on the internet, it can be misused for deepfake crimes. I photograph a lot of children, so it’s practically a mandatory step.. I erase all the tiny blood vessels, and I remove the moles or shift their position slightly, you see?
Then even if a criminal uses AI to deepfake an aged-up photo and sends a threatening message to the parents, the parents can recognize it as a deepfake scam. “My kid’s mole isn’t there?” That works. One tip I can give you.. please, please don’t post original photos of your kids on the internet.

Come to think of it, there were three congratulatory speeches that day. There was no congratulatory song performance.
You can really tailor a small wedding to your liking, can’t you?

When they declared the wedding done and everyone applauded, I eagerly snapped away at the guests.

It’s awkward to move with a veil on, so it comes off. I make sure to capture her lovely look as well.

This is the part where they greet the guests after the ceremony. A small wedding naturally has lots of photos of the couple together with guests.

The conversation seemed to be running long, so I stepped over for a quick photo of an instrument nearby and came back.

The older relatives are introducing people: “this is so-and-so.”

Nothing special, but a sense of being there matters 😀

Since they greet every guest one by one, after the wedding there’s no need for the usual text.. “We apologize that we could not greet each of you personally.” You can skip sending those 🙂
Because.. at a small wedding you go and talk with every single guest in person ~_~

There wasn’t even that super common bouquet toss. I think this small wedding was a ceremony that went almost all-in on greeting the guests.

Capturing the cheerful greetings. I normally photograph a lot of babies, so whenever I see a baby I start shooting automatically..

Upstairs on the second floor were teachers from the couple’s school days.
From what they told me, this was the first wedding like this for them and they loved it. They said they liked that it was relaxed and they could talk a lot..

Greetings at the outdoor table.

The conversation ran long.. and I didn’t want to just hang around, so I shoot the flowers nearby and some food.
It’s a multi-course meal, so small dishes keep coming out one after another.

I walk around and slowly get ready to wrap up. The meal was nearly finished by then, too.

The talk ran long again, so: flower photos 😀

The guests have all finished the main course, while the couple are only now starting their appetizer. That’s the same whether it’s a small wedding or Dynasty Hall.

There’s some kind of drink here and I have no idea what it is. I lived in Europe for 11 years, but there’s still a lot I don’t know.

Thank you for contacting me for a second shoot after Prague 😀
Since coming back to Korea, my clients have been almost entirely people on their second, third, or fourth shoot with me rather than new ones.. I hope this post becomes a chance to meet new people. I wish you happiness always, and I hope to see you again for the third time. Thank you xD

From 2011 to 2014 I shot wedding day photography in Seoul. I’ve been to every well-known wedding hall in Seoul, and the biggest thing I can brag about is probably taking formal group photos of 3,000 guests at Dynasty Hall. The formal group photos alone took two hours..
I left Korea in 2014 and came back in 2026, and I’ve photographed around 4,600 groups in total, including overseas. Most of my wedding day shoots were done while employed by companies, so I have nothing I can show you yet, but I do have experience photographing weddings across many cultures.
I can photograph weddings in all kinds of settings, including wedding halls, outdoor venues, hotels, and cafés, as well as small weddings, so please get in touch 😀

Current prices are 500,000 KRW in Gyeongnam and Busan and 700,000 KRW in Seoul since it requires travel, and if special circumstances are added, such as starting the shoot from the makeup stage, it’s an extra 100,000 to 200,000 KRW. For other regions, please ask. The reason my prices are low right now is that every time I post like this, bookings visibly increase, so increasing the number of shoots itself is what matters.
You can find booking information and contact details on the Sarangbi Snap page.