Category: Expression

For World Photography Day 2026, I went back 23 years to this photograph taken at Lower Seletar Reservoir in 2003 with my first serious digital camera, a 4-megapixel Canon PowerShot G3. Dad posed for me in the beautiful morning light, and the picture became part of a series I called At Work. Looking at it today, I’m struck by how well those four megapixels have held up. The photograph feels especially poignant now. Lower Seletar would become one of Dad’s favourite photographic haunts in his later years, and several of the images he made there are now on show in Tan Lip Seng: A Life in Colour at Objectifs.

A photograph from the beginning of my digital journey, of Dad doing what he loved, in a place that would eventually become part of his own photographic story.

This was one of my unused entries for the Canon Photomarathon, where the theme was simply “Value.”

In the end I submitted a different photograph, but I’ve always had a soft spot for this one. Rows upon rows of batteries, punctuated by glowing price tags, turn an ordinary shop display into a study of repetition, rhythm and colour. The numbers become the subject as much as the products themselves.

Perhaps that’s fitting. Value isn’t always just about the price on the label. Sometimes it’s about finding beauty in the everyday.