"Feels like the light splits the darkness apart": Gellert Gombay's best phone photo

The photographer was on vacation with his family when two shadows became playthings for his young son Gellert Gombay, his wife and two children spend most of the year at their home in Budapest, Hungary, but spend most of their summers in Elsours. "It's a small holiday village on Lake Balaton, the largest in Central Europe, so it's often referred to as the Hungarian Sea," says Gombay, a freelance photographer. "We most days to

On this particular day, the family had hot dogs for lunch before Goomba took the children, Luchi and Janka, to the playground. "Lucci, who was five years old at the time, was jumping between two shadows – one from the dressing room and the other from the roof of a building," he says. "I asked him to stay still for a few minutes until I got shot, and he just lay there on the ground. He's a funny little clown; I'm so glad he's my boy." When he showed the kids, "Janka immediately asked me to take the same picture of him, which happens often. Lucci said he looked like he was in the middle of a mountain, or like a monster was trying to eat him."

Goomba applied his phone's "Cool Dramatic" 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 that it is my son, I see a carefree figure lying in the light while the darkness has eaten away a great piece of space. Even now it is not sad to me. I feel that the light is dispelling the darkness."