A Picture’s Worth With Andrew Proudlove

‘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’.

‘ I took the two original photographs and merged them using Pro HDR’.

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’.