Field note: adapted from my Korean review of 4 November 2024. We paid for the session ourselves. INa was just short of 150 days, not exactly 150. The studio's current profile and booking page are linked below because prices, head-count rules and parking terms have changed since our visit.
INa was changing faster than I could record. We already took constant phone photographs, but I wanted one small session to be deliberate.
We had a formal growth album for the usual milestones. This almost-150-day marker did not need another photographer, so we booked an unstaffed self-photo room instead.
The 2024 Setup
There was no photographer and no staff on site. A door code let us in; posted instructions covered power, camera, printing and closing. In 2024 our two-to-four-person booking was 30,000 won and included the original files. I am not repeating the old parking allowance because the current listing describes a different arrangement.
The Empty Room Is the Feature
My first reaction to "no staff" was mild anxiety about how I would set anything up. That turned out to be misplaced. There is a detailed booklet, and printed instruction sheets are posted at each point where you would plausibly get stuck. You switch on the power strip at the desk, wait for the system to come up, and use that time to look around at the props.
Nobody else was in the room. INa watched us instead of a photographer, and we could stop when she needed us to stop.
There is a blackout curtain, which you draw while shooting. The space felt small when I walked in and larger once I was working in it — comfortably enough for a family photograph, not just a portrait.
The shelf held sunglasses, headbands, balloons, bouquets and a costume cloak. A changing room in the corner made a second outfit possible.
Five Colour Presets, Which Is Four More Than Usual
Most self studios I had looked at commit to a single house look: black and white, or a warm tone, or nothing but colour. You get what the room is set up for.
This one offered five — black and white, brown, cool, warm and colour — and let you shoot in each before choosing. Being able to try them all and then decide was the detail I appreciated most, because a preset you have only seen in someone else's photographs is a guess. I ended up on plain colour: not too yellow, not too cold, which is exactly my preference and something I could not have specified in advance.
Shooting One-Handed
You take the remote from beside the computer and stand in front of the camera. There is a preview screen showing you the frame.
Here is the trap, clearly signposted and still difficult: the camera generating the preview and the camera taking the photograph are not the same one. The instructions tell you to look at the lower camera. My eyes went to the screen anyway, repeatedly, for most of the session.
The other difficulty was mechanical. Holding a five-month-old with one arm and operating the shutter with the other hand is not comfortable, and it prompted the standard question about when exactly she had got so heavy. There are plenty of chairs, so we rotated through several, which at least varied the results.
I also recorded the less flattering truth: she looked lovely and I had not felt camera-ready since giving birth. I stopped adjusting myself and kept photographing her.
The best shot was an accident. I put her alone in a very grand-looking baby chair and danced in front of her to get an expression. Then her energy ran out entirely, so for the final frames I simply put her in the stroller. That last one became my favourite photograph of the session, which is a reliable pattern with babies: the planned setup is rarely the one that works.
The Last Twenty Minutes
Printing and tidying took longer than expected, so we stopped shooting with about twenty minutes left. The prints could not be cropped at the kiosk, and we had framed the baby too loosely. That is visible in the paper copies even though the original files gave us more options later.
Then we returned the props, gathered the stroller and bags, and closed the door. The deliberate photograph I liked most was the one we took after giving up on the deliberate setup.
Sources checked
Last reviewed August 29, 2026.
- Original Korean review – self photo studio just before 150 days — Banggujin Naver Blog
- Current studio profile — Self Photo Studio Pretty Spring
- Current booking page — Naver Booking
Schedules, prices and operating rules can change. Where a detail is time-sensitive, the linked operator remains the final authority.
