Here is the before and after of my portrait:

BEFORE

AFTER

This image was inspired by a drive with my dad in his taxi, where he was driving past an industrial area in Tampines and he told me that it used to be a fish farm when he was younger, where he would go to play with his friends after school. My dad has been a taxi driver for more than a decade and his comment made me wonder how much of Singapore he has seen come and go. I decided to ask my dad to hold a fishing net in our bathroom at home, and the direction I gave him was to pretend to be fishing. I thought that it was poignant how our home has probably been the strongest spatial constant for him in recent years, probably one of the few spaces that many Singaporeans feel that they can hold on to, in contrast to the other spaces that always seem to be at risk of being developed and redeveloped.

I wanted to compose this image in a way that made it feel still somewhat candid, to present a scene that looked seemingly mundane but seems strange upon a second look. For the camera settings, my ISO was set to 320 as I was shooting with rather bright natural light. Although there was sunlight, I was still shooting indoors so I set my shutter speed to 1/20 and aperture to f3.5 to allow enough light in and pull the focus onto my dad. While editing the photo, I removed most of the major spots and some scars on my dad’s skin and face, but left some texture still on his face to retain the suggestion of age, since that was quite important in contributing to the overall tone and message of the image. I also made sure to to adjust the gaussian blur settings to a lower number when doing the Separation Frequency process to ensure that it did not remove all of the texture in the skin.

Here are my photoshop layers:

Here is my psd file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BR_Csk2lR6U0cdD5GSjajeYdxp0rLr-q/view?usp=sharing