This seems like as good a time as any to say what I’ve been thinking in looking at your photo work over the last two years or so. Please take it in the constructive and friendly spirit in which it is offered! You have come a long way, and I think if you persevere you have the makings of a good photographer. This batch in particular shows you are quite capable of breaking away from your typical spread of rather static and highly repetitive architectural photo studies. Don’t get me wrong, I like that subject, and you often do it justice, and I have suggested before that you seriously plan to do a photo-and-extended-caption book on modern Korean architecture (i.e. mid 19th century to the present). Although to really do high quality photo architectural studies you will need to use a perspective-shift lens or a larger format camera with tilts and shifts to get rid of all that barrel distortion. But that is an aside.

The two things I want to say are, from my perspective, first, you need to learn to EDIT your own work ruthlessly. Posting multiple versions of almost the same scene because you like them all or can’t decide which is better is a classic symptom of amateurism. How many images do you really need to tell a story? Hint: look in Geo, National Geographic, or Vanity Fair. The other thing is to take more pictures of people, and that means engaging them, not sneaking photos from afar with a telephoto lens, but interacting with them to the point where they are comfortable being photographed or forget you are there. Professional photojournalists take most of their people shots with wide angle, not telephoto lenses, which means they are right next to them. I realize this may present special cultural and legal problems in Korea… but believe me, it’s easier there than in Latin America or France!

The strongest suggestion I can make is that you seriously consider investing the time, energy, and money into one or more high-powered professional photography workshops with one or more world-class working photographers (anybody at National Geographic or Magnum for starters, but the choice is yours). What you’ll find is the workshops at that level usually aren’t much about technique, they’re about engagement, style, philosophy, story-telling, refining and advancing your own style, and merciless editing, editing, editing… And I think you will be amazed and gratified at what you can learn in a five-day workshop with a really good teacher and interacting with other serious students.
Anyway, best of luck and I look forward to more of your photos from Korea and your development as a photographer.

I greatly enjoy meeting and conversing with middle-aged and old folks in the country…including Daegu, which from the point of view of y’all who live in Seoul, is the country . Salt of the earth, and no pretense about them.