A short set of images taken walking along the banks of the Hangang river in Seoul. This was a particularly rainy and wet time and there were few people around, often giving the illusion of an abandoned city – an illusion that is easily broken if you are just a little higher and can see all the traffic!

I am still finding my feet at the moment and I will write more on Seoul and Korea when I have had enough time to understand the region better than I do at present.

All images were taken with the GFX100s and 55mm f1.7 lens with a polarising filter and using the ‘Classic Chrome’ starting point for editing. These are from about 40km of walking over three days in very wet conditions. Carrying the camera on these walks without shoulder pain is tricky, so I am trying a belt+holster system which puts the weight on the hips and is quite a bit more comfortable. The GF55 is a large and heavy lens but is excellent in low light conditions, such as going to be the case when I get around to some night photography.

DxO Photolab 7 was used for raw processing, which is still causing me some pain in use. Aside from the obvious flaw where it does not work with all cameras (Q2M!), there are some serious functional deficiencies where ‘undo’ in many cases does no such thing (any metadata edits, or image edits with multiple images selected), and where geometric changes after making a local edits will wreck the mask positions – all without any kind of warning. That said, when it works the results are excellent. The lens profile for the GF55 is particularly useful, as the lens has a substantial distortion that is difficult to fully correct manually.

I am currently running parallel processing using Lightroom Classic and an old copy of Capture One Pro and will hopefully settle on a solution. DxO makes that harder than it should be, because the lack of Q2M support means I can not use DxO alone but need to pair it with software that supports the Leica, whether via darktable-cli as a pre-processor, or by keeping an old copy of COP running.