Yesterday Seoul had perhaps the clearest skies I’ve seen since returning to Korea. From my office in the west of Seoul, I could see Mount Gwanak in the south and apartment complexes from all over the city. There were some great clouds, too.

My office is pretty high up, but the windows are tinted, so you cannot really take decent photos from inside. But then I realized that the building has a helicopter pad on the roof. So I headed up and tried taking some photos from there.

First I went up in the middle of the afternoon. Here’s a pic looking west. You can see Banghwa Bridge far off on the left, and Ilsan to the distance, slightly to the right:

Later, I went up around sundown, when the magic hour was turning the city orange:

And here’s the view to the east. You can see the new high-rises at Hapjeong, then Yeouido behind them, and in the distance Mount Gwanak:

The same view, but a bit further back with the helicopter pad in view:

Then I tried out the panorama setting on my Galaxy S3 camera. There’s a few wonky stitches, but overall I thought it looked pretty good:

Argh. This blog format doesn’t allow me to throw in extra-wide images. Need to find a good place to show off these panoramas…