Travel Photography: Craftsmanship in South Korea

Note: This article was first published on 27th May 2015.

Writing In Search of Old Japan changed my life. Walking around with a DSLR camera in Japan, trying to take good photos, failing miserably most of the time, but yet coming home with a few photographs I’m happy with to this day, made me think that maybe - maybe, I could actually take a decent shot.

And so, when HardwareZone collaborated with LG to do a second guide to travel photography using a smartphone, I thought I would nail this feature out of the gate.

Boy, was I naïve.

It was tough. I overestimated myself, walking far more a day than I ever did in Japan. I kept taking bad photograph after bad photograph, taking hit after hit to my confidence. And yet, by the end of seven days in South Korea, I came home with more pictures that I’m happy to share with you.

This is how I did it, and what I learned along the way.

Before we start…

Before I flew, I picked a theme to focus on while shooting in Korea. I’ve talked about having a theme before in In Search of Old Japan, and I want to reiterate how having a theme - having a constraint - can actually be liberating. You can’t possibly shoot everything, and there’s so much to photograph, so having constraints helps you to focus on your trip.

I chose the theme ‘craftsmanship’ for my Korean trip, and yes, it’s kind of abstract. Not every theme needs to be. Last year, when I went on holiday with my in-laws, my theme was simple: happy candid shots of my wife with her parents. Having a theme definitely helped me capture more shots of them being happy together.

Embracing constraints

This time, I’m armed with LG's latest flagship smartphone, the G4, and not a DSLR camera. With the image quality you can get these days, it’s possible to create memorable travel photographs using only a smartphone. The G4 is also technically promising, with a quick f/1.8 lens, high-resolution 16MP sensor and a unique colour spectrum sensor. It can even save in raw!

But shooting with a smartphone is different from shooting with a camera, mostly because there’s no optical zoom. It’s just you and a single focal length. Yes, that means there’ll be shots I can’t get, but I try to remember that Henri Cartier-Besson made some of the most iconic photographs of the last century using a single 50mm lens.

From personal experience, I can tell you that having constraints is a paradoxical way to free up your creativity. It’s like how, instead of having an unlimited canvas and all the colors in the world, you’re given a notebook and a black pen. One makes you wonder what you’re going to do, the other makes it easier for you to just do something.

There’s one more personal constraint I’m embracing in this feature. Instead of processing these photos through Adobe Lightroom like I’d usually do, I’ve processed them all on the LG G4 itself, using the third-party VSCO Cam app. The G4 surprised me with its true-to-life colors, but I’ve always loved finishing the image myself. You can still click on each photo to see the original picture.

Craftmanship in South Korea

I started my first day walking around in Seoul’s Bukchon Hanok Village. The Village is a sprawling, hilly area that will give your calves a workout, so go ready. It’s touristy, but it’s also home to traditional Korean houses called hanok. You’re constantly reminded to keep quiet, as people still stay here.

The Village is also home to some traditional craft houses, and that’s why I was there. Many turned out to be dusty museums, but there were a few workshops where you could still take part in making things, like Korean knots and miniature Korean wooden houses. No photographs though.

It was along the Gyedong-gil street of shops that I met Kim Young Hwan. I love ceramics, and when I walked into her store, she was sitting at her desk, crafting. I shuffled nervously around her store, before working up the courage to ask if I could take pictures of her working. She graciously agreed. With her permission, I made a series of portraits, trying different angles (01, 02). I eventually chose the one above out of them, it’s a straight-on portrait, but it tells you a story about what Kim is doing, without any unnecessary clutter.

I have one favourite missed shot from this shoot, and it’s this photograph of her hands with her half-formed cups (03). I love how their soft curves work with the neutral colours in the image, but unfortunately a conflicting pair of scissors is cutting into the picture. The scissors’ harsh lines and fiery red detract away from the main subject, so the photo doesn’t work. If I’d noticed it at the time, I would have asked Kim to put it away.

Shucks. It’s a good reminder for me to always pay attention to the entire frame, and exclude whatever isn’t essential, because it always distracts from the main subject.

After giving my legs an intense workout walking around the Bukchon Hanok Village, I walked right across to Insadong, an area known for its arts and craft shops. That’s where I saw these. I swear, I thought the first was leather, but it surprised me by being hanji; traditional Korean handmade paper. I knew I had to show this to you guys, but how?

During this trip, I realized that I like to talk to myself when I photograph. When something grabs me and says, "Take a picture of me!" I like to ask, "What is it about you that I am liking so much?" I once heard photographer Art Wolfe say, "If I can say it, I can see it," and that’s pretty much what I’m doing.

In my conversation with these sheets of paper, what I was really liking were their rich, organic textures. So I knew these were going to be close-up, detail shots. When I went in tight however, it wasn’t so clear that these were sheets of paper (04). When I included the paper’s edges, it became clearer what you were looking at.

Whenever I shoot, I try to make the subject as clear as possible, weaving in as many necessary clues as possible. My viewers won’t have the clues I had when experiencing the scene, they’ll be looking at a flat image, not standing in front of a hanji shop in front of Insadong, feeling the paper’s textures in their hands.

So the challenge is always to compose the photograph in a way that makes them see what I saw, and feel what I felt. "Look at this. Yes, it’s paper. Aren’t the textures amazing?"

I’d seen sheets of hanji with traditional Korean writing and assumed they’d been stamped on by a machine. Imagine my surprise when I walked into this hanji store and saw this elder writing the characters by hand!

If a photographer is a hunter, there are really only three things I hunt for: a great subject, a great background, and great light. When you find three of them together, you can keep shooting until you bust your SD card.

In this case, I saw two: a great subject against a great background, with okay light. This combination is still good enough that when you see it you should still go, “Shutter time!” In this background, I especially love how the big brown brush hanging in the background reinforces what he’s doing with the brush in his hands - it’s background and subject working together to make a stronger image. Weaving in clues again.

I asked him if I could take photographs, and he kindly agreed. In In Search of Old Japan, I talked about whether to ask for permission when taking photographs or not. Again, I believe there’s a time and place for both. Here, I was walking into this man’s shop and taking photographs of him while he was working. I wanted to be respectful, so I asked.

But you know, even after having done it so many times, it’s still not easy for me. My heart beats faster, my mouth dries up and my head is exploding from embarrassment -- and that’s before I’ve opened my mouth! But I find that most people are nice enough, and being ready for a "no" all the time makes it easier to accept rejections with a smile.

The Cheonggyecheon stream is a massive work, and a testament to master craftsmanship. It used to be a real stream, but it was covered over with a highway in the last century, and almost became totally dry. It was eventually restored in 2005, but it wasn’t easy — the highway had to be removed, and tons of water had to be pumped in daily from the Han River.

Today, it’s one of Seoul’s most popular attractions, which was why I was there after walking through Insadong. I wanted to try a something a little different, and see if I could apply DLSR techniques on a smartphone while shooting the stream.

Before taking my final shot, I walked around the head of the stream to find an angle that I like (05, 06). If there’s one tip that I hope you remember, it’s this: sketch more. It’s rare that your first shot of something turns out to be the best one - it’s often a starting point more than anything. When you find something interesting, it’s worth it to sketch around a little more, try different angles, go higher, go lower, to find more engaging compositions. I eventually settled on this overhead view from a bridge overlooking the stream, because I like the strong leading lines sweeping through the image from front to back.

Here’s the technical part: I then mounted the G4 on a Joby Gorillapod Hybrid with a Joby GripTight Mount adapter, and attached the entire thing onto a handrail. I then used the Manual mode in the G4’s built-in camera app to set the shutter speed for a long exposure shot.

There was still quite a bit of light, so I held an ND (neutral density) filter in front of the camera lens. An ND filter is a piece of glass that reduces the amount of light, and is usually used with a holder fixed to the front of a DSLR camera’s lens. Here, I was using it with great effect on a smartphone. I shot the scene at four seconds, using motion blur to give the Cheonggyecheon stream a silky smooth look.

I think it turned out okay. I would have preferred the oval platform to be higher in the frame, but I wanted to cut the distracting yellow sign out of the image as much as possible (not very possible, unfortunately). Still, it was fun trying out traditional DSLR shooting techniques on a smartphone, and seeing what would happen.

On the second day, I made way out of Seoul, traveling two hours to the Icheon Ceramics Village. I wasn’t sure what I would find as I had already read online that the kilns were fired up only in winter. But as a traveler, sometimes you just have to take chances. It turned out that not only were the kilns closed, so were the couple of workshops I walked into, and I ended up with pottery for subjects. Not very captivating.

But I did notice some ceramics displayed along the windows, against strong sunlight (07, 08). One of the early ‘rules’ I learned as a young photographer was to always have the light on your back when shooting. That would make sure that whatever you were shooting at would be in good light and not in shadow.

Like all photography rules, that rule has its reason for being. And like all photography rules, there’s a time and place to break it. Here, I realised I could use the strong backlight to my advantage. By exposing for the ceramics, it would overexpose the background, turning the messy streets outside into pure white, placing emphasis directly onto the shapes of the ceramics themselves.

After a day of getting nothing much in the Icheon Ceramics Village, I found a goldmine the next day in the Sindang area. Right outside of Sindang Station Exit 8 is a street full of paradoxes; just a few steps away from the posh Chungmu Art Hall are honest-to-goodness carpentry workshops and metalsmiths (tip of the hat to Seoul Sub-urban, where I first learned about the area).

I found three old-school metalsmith workshops sitting next to each other, with metal hooks, hammers, picks, rings, bars and chains hanging off, laid out, and strewn all over (09). There was great background, but where were the light and subject?

I squeezed inside one workshop’s narrow entrance, and this man greeted me with a smile. I gave him a huge smile back, because I was looking at great background, light and subject. Cloistered from the flat sunlight outside, the light inside his workshop had depth and contrast. It moved from light to dark, which added three-dimensionality to the picture. A blue light was falling on the anvil to the left, which contrasted beautifully with the warm light from the furnace on the right.

I asked him if I could take his photographs, and he readily said yes, then kept on smithing with a big grin on his face. This location was so remarkable I could have shot here for hours, but he was eventually called outside for business.

I’d eventually shoot more workshops in Korea, but none turned out as magically as the ones I shot inside this metalsmith’s workshop. I kept asking myself why, and it comes back to that combination of great background, great subject, and great light. My other photographs had one or the other, but this series had three in abundance.

I must have dozens of photos of Korean door knobs (10), but I’ve singled this one out because it has a sense of place the others don’t. The curved roofs of the building in the metal carving reflect the curved roofs on top of Korean hanok, and the old Korean doors use these rings to hook and lock the two sides together.

It comes back to including clues inside the picture of where you were, just like in the photo of hanji. When it comes to travel photography, it’s nice to include clues of a place to tell the viewer where you went; like including a couple in traditional dress, or signs in the background written in the native language.

When it comes to taking pictures, a good rule of thumb is to shoot during the ‘golden hours’ - the hour during sunrise, and the hour during sunset. That’s when the rising and setting sun cast the world in soft, golden light, which contrasts beautifully with the blues of the early morning and evening.

Waking up at 4 in the morning is the last thing you want to do on vacation, but the great light you get can change the look of your photographs completely. Plus, your companions aren’t likely to join you, so you can shoot to your heart’s content.

At least, that’s the idea. I crawled out of bed many mornings in Korea, only to find dull and overcast skies without a hint of glorious sunlight. Still, I headed out, because you never know when you’ll catch a break.

I finally caught a sunset, the evening of my first day in the hanok village in Jeonju, which is a couple of hours away from Seoul by express train. The village is mostly a fun tourist trap, with kitschy souvenir shops and dry museums, but wandering around the side-alleys I’d occasionally by floored by sights like this ancient hanok (11).

The setting sun was bathing the hanok with dabs of fiery reds and yellows, and I saw this tree catching just a hint of the light, as if aflame. It’s a perfect example of the warm and cool colour contrasts you can get during the golden hours. The hanok roof provides a clue to where I am.

I photographed this hanok not long after the earlier shot. Again, we see how the golden light transforms an ordinary scene; the warm light has intensified the already warm colours of the hanok, creating a strong contrast against the blue sky. By luck, a single line of cloud provided a strong leading line, it draws your eye through the frame into the hanok.

We’ve been talking about what’s inside the frame, but now let’s talk about the frame itself. Specifically, about the frame’s aspect ratio, or how long and short the dimensions of the image are. The G4 let me set three aspect ratios: 16:9, 4:3 and 1:1. Now, to me, there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ aspect ratios, if you use them intentionally.

For example, a 16:9 aspect ratio is a wider, more cinematic look, which might make it more suitable for wide landscapes. If you want to shoot a portrait, 16:9 might be too long, so you might switch to a more proportionate 4:3. A 1:1 aspect ratio might work better for details, because it excludes so much from the frame. Your choice of frame depends on and affects what’s inside the frame, and it's another way to affect the overall impact of your photo.

Here’s same photo cropped into different aspect ratios. Does it change the way you feel about the shot? How? Why?

I got this shot because I’d missed it earlier. I’d passed by this restaurant, which kept a giant dog in the lawn. The dog had gone up to a customer seated by the window, and gave her a quick sniff. She turned around and made eye contact with the dog, which made a perfect moment — that I missed completely (12).

I waited a while to see if the moment would come again, but the dog laid down and seemed content to just chill (13), so I walked away and got my shots of the earlier hanok. The situation was so unique though, that I kept it in my head. Unusual situations hold potential for interesting photographs, and this one was different enough that I now made my way back, approaching the restaurant with the G4 out.

I walked by, saw this perfect scene, and took the shot. It’s difficult to tell a story in a single photo, but one way to do it is by using contrasts, and I like this picture because it has two.

The first is the conceptual contrast: there are two people inside, enjoying their food, there is one dog outside, looking sad without any food. The second is the colour contrast; the warm yellows in the interior contrast the cool blues of the exterior, emphasising the difference between inside and outside.

On my second-last morning in South Korea, I walked to the Jeonju River and was greeted by this magnificent sunrise. For me, this is a photo about leading lines, I love how the long line of the path leads right to the magnificent burst of sun at the end. The jogger adds a focal point to the image, without him the frame looks empty.

Now, how do you feel about the jogger running out of the frame, towards you, instead of running into the frame, away from you? What do you think one says compared to the other? To me, this image is a story about a person coming from the light, his journey coming to an end at the edge of the frame. I actually would have preferred it if he was running into the frame instead, which signals that his journey to the light is just starting.

I processed this frame in Adobe Lightroom on the desktop instead of on the G4, because it’s a raw file. Shooting sunrises and sunsets can be tricky, because they create high contrasts between light and dark areas, and it’s easy to lose shadows as well as highlights.

Knowing that, I used Manual mode on the G4 to save this series in raw, so I could get at least a couple more stops to work with in post compared to JPEG. The G4 saves the raw file in the open DNG format, so I could read it immediately in Lightroom that evening. I shoot in raw when I use a digital camera because it saves so much more information, and it amazed me that I could now do the same with a smartphone.

Here’s another shot to show you how much flexibility you can get in a raw file, here I exposed for the intense highlights (14) and later recovered the shadows in Lightroom (15). The G4 makes it easy to control exposure in Manual mode with the exposure compensation tool, a setting DSLR users will be familiar with.

It doesn’t feel like I made this photo, instead it feels like this photo was given to me as a gift. Jang Mi Youn makes elegant paintings of Korean women in traditional hanbok (Korean dress). When I walked into her shop in a Jeonju alleyway, my eyes were drawn to her colourful and textured work desk, which I knew would make a great photo.

I explained myself to her and asked if I could take some photos. She agreed and I shot her desk, but it was a great background without a great subject (16). I asked if she could sit at her desk, and she not only graciously sat, but started to paint as I made her portraits, and gave me the painting as a parting gift.

Again and again, I was surprised by how many people opened up their workshops and selves to me and my camera, simply because I asked. Without their permission, these photographs couldn’t have been made, and I’m grateful to them for it.

When I look at the pictures I took in Korea versus the ones I took in Japan, the one difference that strikes me is how much closer to people I am in Korea. I think there are three reasons for this; the first is that the G4’s single focal length forced me to actually get closer to people to make their portraits. Secondly, it felt like people were less intimidated by me getting closer with a small smartphone, compared with a big DSLR camera obscuring my face.

The third reason is something I consciously forced myself to do, and it’s a quote I first heard from photographer Steve Simon:

“Take the picture, then move three steps closer.” — Bill Durrence

I find that I normally start too far from the subject, and I don’t even realise it. It reminds me of what Robert Capa said; “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” By going closer, I find that my photographs almost always get stronger.

This is one of my favourite images, and I took this earlier in Seoul, on a rainy evening. You’re looking at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in the background, a building for design-focused shows and conferences. The points of light flooding the mid-ground are manmade white roses, each lit from within their buds.

The problem is that the scene looked nothing like this when I got there in the afternoon. The light was drab, and nothing was happening. I made a few sketch images, looking for angles (17, 18), and thought there might be a potentially great background here…later. A quick check with the information counter revealed that the roses would be turned on in the evening, so I went for an early dinner.

When I walked out later, it was drizzling. I enjoy shooting in the rain, the water on the ground adds depth through reflections, and people with umbrellas sometimes make colourful shapes. Luckily I'd packed an umbrella.

I went back to the place I’d scouted earlier, and made this shot of a couple. Nice background, but their silhouettes were too tangled up together to read clearly (19). One of the best pieces of advice I’d ever gotten as a photographer is that if you find a great background with great light, then wait around for a great subject to appear, so I did.

After a few people came and went, this group of schoolgirls came to take pictures. One of them started talking excitedly, and they rushed into a circle — right where my focal point was. The shape of their umbrellas clustered together into an interesting shape (20), but it was when one of them raised her umbrella, creating variety and contrast, that I knew I had my shot.

To be honest, I’m surprised this image is even sharp, I was clinging onto my umbrella with one hand, trying to keep dry, while trying to frame the moment at the same time. The EXIF data says this was shot at 1/17th of a second, which is a pretty low shutter speed, so it was most likely the G4’s optical image stabilisation that kept this shot steady.

What is travel photography?

What’s a travel photograph? As long as I go overseas, isn’t any photograph I take over there a ‘travel photograph?’

Travel photographs are the photographs you make from the airplane window, of the delicious local food you had, and the group shots in front of the famous attraction. I have lots of photos like that too, from my week in Korea, of places and details that I want to remember.

Then there are the other travel photographs. The ones which combine great light, subjects and backgrounds into photographs that show how you felt about a place, not just what you saw there.

These days, taking photographs you like is easy. Taking photographs you love is harder. But craft is, and always has been, hard. It’s just that it’s easier to get your hands on a camera these days and start shooting than it is to get a violin and start improvising, so maybe we forget that.

If there’s one thing that I learned in these seven days, it’s that getting something good may be hard, but if you keep shooting, you’ll eventually get something you love. Facing dozens of bad photographs, I kept walking, kept shooting, and eventually created a body of work I feel confident about. That I could do it with a smartphone was remarkable, but not revolutionary, considering how much better their cameras are getting these days.

With a little more effort - waking up a little earlier, waiting a little longer, asking a little more, trying more angles, capturing a few more moments - you have a chance at getting a travel photograph you’ll love that extra bit more. And I hope you try it.

Happy and safe travels.

Alvin Soon

P.S. Ping me at asoon@sph.com.sg or @alvinsoon if you have questions and comments.