‘It feels like the light is pushing the darkness apart’: Gellért Gombai’s best phone picture

Gellért Gombai, his wife and two children spend much of the year at their home in Budapest, Hungary, but most of their summers in Alsóörs. “It’s a small holiday village on Lake Balaton, the largest in central Europe, so it’s often referred to as the Hungarian sea,” Gombai, a freelance photographer, says. “We go to the playground and beach most days, swim, and eat beach food, but even when I’m enjoying my holiday, I’m looking out for interesting moments to capture.”

On this particular day, the family had eaten hotdogs for lunch, before Gombai had taken the kids, Lóci and Janka, to the playground. “Lóci, who was five at the time, was jumping between two shadows – one from a changing room, and the other from a building’s roof,” he says. “I asked him to stay still for a few minutes while I got the shot, and he lay like this on the ground. He’s a big-hearted little clown; I’m so glad he’s my son.” When he showed the children, “Janka immediately asked me to take the same shot of her, which often happens. Lóci said it looked like he was among mountains, or as though a monster was about to eat him.”

Gombai applied his phone’s “dramatic cool” filter, and made some minor adjustments. “I really liked the slightly metaphysical spaces created by light and shadow,” he says. “If I forget for a moment it’s my son, I see a carefree form lying in the light while the darkness has bitten a large piece out of the space. Even still, it doesn’t feel sad to me. I have the feeling that the light is pushing the darkness apart.”