ICE

In this post I will talk about how I created my "ICE" series of artistic photos.

Fire and Ice

"Fire and Ice" was my first photo in this series. I was in the back yard one chilly morning and found sheets of ice had formed on the pool cover. I broke a sheet to a manageable size and was struck by the way the bubbles were trapped inside. I set the ice sheet aside and ran to get my camera. I knew I needed something colorful behind it, so I took one of the kids' colored stepping stones and set it up with the ice sheet in front, but it needed more. Enter the  NEEWER RGB62 Magnetic RGB Video Light (https://a.co/d/gCuLBN2) I had just purchased on Amazon. I set up my RGB light and put it off to one side, shining cyan blue light across the back of the ice sheet. The "folds" in the ice came from slight raised areas of the pool cover leaving depressions in the ice. I loaded that pic into Photoshop Elements and raised the saturation way up to give this bright red-orange and blue photo.

The next photo used a different ice sheet, held up to view the neighbor's houses through it. I snapped the pic and again, raised the saturation to create the colorful tableau below:

Neighborhood

Both of these photos looked best at their native 16x9 sizing, so I framed them for printing, thus the dark bars at the top and bottom of the pictures. I also took one with the light directly behind the sheet of ice and without the orange stepping stone:

Deep Blue ICE

I continued taking more pictures in different colors subsequent days and nights that I found new ice on the pool cover, each with its own unique pattern:

Green and Gold

Lava

Black and ICE

Sun and Sky

"Black and ICE" was created by taking a picture of the sun and sky through tree branches. I then turned up the saturation to create "Sun and Sky".

In addition to sheets of ice, I also happened across ice in the process of forming crystals. I took these delicate crystals and stacked them up, then used two RGB lights with different colors to light them from each side, resulting in the three pictures below:

Early 90's Flashback

Color Riot

Silver and Gold

The thing I love the most about these pictures is the fact that they can never be perfectly recreated. The ice that helped create them is gone. No sheet of ice will ever form the exact same patterns of bubbles and waves, making these pictures as unique as the ice itself.