A Picture’s Worth With Andrew Proudlove
Welcome to another new section to theappwhisperer.com, this new section is entitled ‘A Picture’s Worth…’ and it is a subsection of our Photo App Lounge column. A Picture’s Worth… is where we ask iPhone photographers that have taken or made, as the case may be, powerful iPhone art to explain the processes they took. This includes their initial thoughts as to what they wanted to create, why they wanted to create it, how they created it, including all apps used and what they wanted to convey. We also ask these incredible artists to explain their emotions and how the image projects those feelings.
This is another totally unique section to theappwhisperer.com and one that offers the unique facility for the reader/viewer to find out more about an image and also for the artist to explain the complete process and message.
Today we are talking to Andrew Proudlove, we previously interviewed Andrew in both our A Day In The Life Of and Extension of the I interviews. Andrew is an enthusiastic and very talented mobile photographer based in beautiful Prague, in the Czech Republic. Andrew studied Software Engineering at university in England and practiced sketching and computer art in his spare time. After living and working in America he returned to Europe, delivering IT support in a newsroom for a TV station in the Czech republic before moving to an IT manager’s role at a law firm.
Andrew has had work featured in Pixels, as part of the Mobile Photography Awards weekly review and on other websites and has been voted Artist of the day at iPhoneArt.com.
In this A Picture’s Worth … today, Andrew talks us through his image ‘Girls In The Meadow’, enjoy…
(If you would like to contribute to this section or if you have seen an image that you would like to learn more about, just email [email protected] and we will get it all set up).
Birth Of A Concept
‘On this particular day, we were at a friends house across the street from our own and behind their house is a greenbelt, that at this time of year is overgrown with wild flowers and tall grass. Which of course makes it a natural magnet for kids to play in.
One thing thats important to add at this point, is that all of this, the friends house and the green belt is on a hill with the friends house cut into a recess in the hill. So when you’re standing next to the house, your eyes are level with the lay of the land and you’re shooting up the hill. The reason I mention this is because the sun was slightly off to one side and so at the time I was photographing some of the flowers, using the really good light that was there, when the kids started to run past at the top of the garden on the hill. They were having such a good time and were so happy that it would almost have been a crime not to try to capture it, however with the sun providing a backlight, I had a couple of choices, either move up onto the hill with the kids (and risk spoiling the mood) or stay where I was, part of the scenery and use the silhouettes to my advantage.
What I was really trying to capture in this image, was just the joy of the moment and the happiness and fun that the kids were having.
The final image is a combination of three photographs that I took that day and actually came into being by playing with Pro HDR. I was using Bracket Mode to combine some of the flower shots I had took and decided just for kicks to combine a couple of the photographs of the kids running around to see what would happen and it gave me this brilliant base image that I just knew that I had to run with. So I took, the base image from Pro HDR, ran it through Snapseed’s drama function, then went into image blender and from there into Pixlromatic, back into Image Blender and so on, slowly building up layers until I got to the final image that for me captured the extraordinary light that was there that day and the sense of fun that the kids were having’.
The Process – Original 1
‘ I took the two original photographs and merged them using Pro HDR’.
Original 2
Merged with Pro HDR.
‘The sky in the area where the kids were playing didn’t have any of the wonderful clouds that were there that day, so I took one of the other photos I had from a different angle and added the clouds to the image in Image Blender’.
‘I put the image into Snapseed’s drama filter and really liked the result’.
‘I noticed the ghost image of my daughter didn’t quite fit, so I saved and then put the snapseed image into Image Blender with one of the original photographs and blended the ghost out and saved’
‘The foreground on the blended image was too blurred, so I blended the foreground from the Snapseed image over the top and saved’.
Foreground fixed.
‘From there I went into Pixlromatic, my intention was to make this a color-washed image but I accidentally selected one of the black and white films and liked the result more. So I saved it’.
‘ I had an idea which of the light filters in Pixlromatic I wanted to use but tried some others and ended up liking them too, so I saved each version out individually’.
Pixlromatic light layer 2.
Pixlromatic light layer 1.
Pixlromatic layers blended.
Pixlromatic final – drama.
‘ I went back into Image Blender and started the process of adding each of the Pixlromatic images as a layer to create the near final image’.
‘I wanted to emphasize some of the sunbeams, so I took the saved image from Blender and loaded it into Rays’.
‘ I took the saved image from Rays and combined it with the Blender image and softened the light some and removed it from areas where it didn’t need to be by blending it out’.
‘ I then went into Photoshop Express and used the Reduce Noise function to clear up the sky and add a soft dream-like effect to the image’.
Screen Show
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2 Comments
Kim Martino
Very informative article, beautiful images, all of them! Thank you Andrew & Joanne!
Andrew Proudlove
Your welcome Kim, hope you enjoyed it! 🙂