compare!

I got my professionally done passport photos today. But first, let's review some previous photos. First is my current passport's photo from 2015:

This passport expires in October of this year.

Next up is the photo I recently and unprofessionally took in a subway photo booth (photo window was low, so I'm leaning forward). Compared to today's photo (see next image), this makes me look like a criminal:

thug

And lastly, here's a scan of today's professionally done photo, taken at the lobby-level photo studio in my building, which is run by a chirpy, giggly girl who spoke mostly in Korean to me except for one bizarre moment when she switched totally over to English (which she spoke slowly but well), then started in Korean again:

when a pro does the work

When I scanned the photo, it was slightly angled, so I auto-rotated it in Photoshop and trimmed the edges a bit, but it's still almost the 51 mm × 51 mm (2" × 2") required by the US Department of State (not that scale matters once you factor in dpi and display size).

My scanner's screen had some schmutz on it, around my nose and on my shirt, so I had to use the Photoshop "bandage" tool to "heal" the photo (i.e., erase a foreign object by interpolating and averaging out colors from all sides) and erase the dandruff-looking nastiness. I think the pic cleaned up okay. I at least seem to have lost weight since 2015. But there's no hiding the old, baggy eyes. The eye bags are going to occupy half my face by the time I'm 70 (if I live that long). Life's been rough, even for those of us who keep to ourselves, live quietly, and try to mind our own business (except maybe in terms of what we blog about).