A visit to the Gyeonbokgung Palace in Seoul, Korea

On Saturday, we got lucky enough to have a small break in the rain so we headed over to the Gyeonbokgung Palace. (Try saying that three times!) It would have been nice to have blue skies but the cloudy skies provided some nice soft light to shoot in, and that's what we did.

As you walk around these old palaces, you can't help but shoot all these amazing colorful details. The combination of the bright colors and the repetitive patterns really makes for stunning images. It reminded me a lot of the architecture in Beijing when I was there for the Olympics.

As I walked around the palace, I tried to find different details to focus on. This gargoyle caught my attention since he was in a position in front of the main building where I could get low and shoot him against the ceiling.

And for something a little cuter than the gargoyle, here is a little guy dressed in costume.

As you can tell, I was really taken with the architecture and was constantly looking for new angles to shoot.

There were hundreds of people in the main square (just off to the right of this image), so I walked around and found this really cool path with repeated columns. I shot many images here, both portrait and landscape, but found that it was just a little too "empty". So I set up the tripod and waited for someone to walk into the scene so that I could fill the frame with a subject. I slowed the shutter to add some movement to the walker.

At the front gates (I think we went in the back way), there were more people dressed in costume.

Jason was shooting some images of this door (since he likes to focus on details of wood) and so I poked my head into his shot. Then I decided to set my camera on the tripod and shoot some images of us being goofy. This image really cracked us up. :)

Just outside the main gates of the Gyeonbokgung Palace is the bustling city of Seoul.

After an early dinner, I decided to go out for a couple more night shots. The evening before, we saw these small streets with lots of signs, located just a couple of blocks from our hotel. I figured that the raining streets would give me some good reflections to work with. I shot some images and was not thrilled with any of them, so I decided to try and roll the zoom to get the cool effects. This was my only "keeper" from that short walk.