Seoul is a city that, for some reason or another, I had never really given much thought to up until recently. I really couldn’t tell you why, but I can tell you that whatever that reason was, it was wrong. Not that I would ever be so bold as to think that I’ve been everywhere I want to go and seen everything I want to see, but after going to as many amazing places as I’ve been, seeing and experiencing some of the biggest cities in the world, it’s an easy trap to fall into thinking that it’ll be near impossible to top the Tokyos, Hong Kongs, Taipeis, and Bangkoks of the world. And yet here we are. In retrospect I should have come here much sooner, although it is nice to know that I’m still able to be so pleasantly surprised by a new place. With how incredible this city turned out to be, it really ended up being a great reminder that there are still so many beautiful places out there that I have to see.
Now I took a slightly different approach to my photography on this trip. Nothing too crazy, but a sort of evolution of how I’ve been shooting on my trips over the past decade. I generally take most of my pictures on 35mm while focusing on more of a documentary-style of shooting, then make concerted efforts to get out with my medium format camera to take more ‘deliberate’ shots. Usually at night or twilight, oftentimes with my tripod, or also when shooting specific places or things which I had been planning to shoot in 120. This has worked out fairly well for me in the past, but when it came time to make prints I always looked at my 35mm shots and wished I had taken them on 120. So I decided on this trip to only shoot 120, and to try to use it for both more deliberate photography, and documentary-style stuff. Now that this trip is all said and done I have to say, I really enjoyed this more simplified philosophy to my shooting. Only time will tell, but I’ll probably be following a similar approach on my future trips.