We had a partial overnight freeze last night. By focusing on small areas of my pond where there was ice I could find some interesting patterns. In this case, as the title says, you’re seeing a mixture of ice (sharp structures), water (the smoother areas), and the leaves on the bottom providing color. A 25 shot stack. (R5, 180mm macro, 0.3 s, f/10, iso 800, tripod, polarizer and 2s timer)
Original
-25 saturation
Wow Mark, another beauty!! There is so many wonderful lines, texture and colors to look at. A 25 shot stack - amazing. I haven’t been that interested in abstracts yet (just trying to get better at landscape before moving on), but your abstracts are up there with the best and I think creating these types of abstracts would be lots of fun. Great job!!!
Really nice photo. A wonderful combination of shapes, texture and color only nature can provide.
A couple of questions for my education. Were you directly over the ice or is this at and angle? How big of an area was photographed?
Thanks for sharing.
Really nice work, Mark. Interesting how it could almost be a high-altitude aerial until you get the scale.
This is just beautiful Mark. I absolutely love it. The mixture of textures and tones, lines in different directions, sharp and softly rounded sections…all held together nicely by those colours throughout. The yellowish streak in the middle provides a focus (for me anyway), and helps to create the feeling that it is part of a plateau that falls off to the left. As I look at it after that, it conveys the feeling of a landscape with hills and slopes at the top and lower right, a gebtly sloping plateau in the centre, and a river canyon at the lower left edge. Just a wonderful abstract. Cheers.
I will echo what everyone has stated by saying this is a superb abstract Mark! I like how Phil described the image. It resembles a mini landscape. The colors and clarity are excellent and that 25 image focus stack is so well done. Definitely engaged my imagination with your image!
I posted the wrong photo on my last
attempt. Sorry. love this photo and very interesting to learn it is a 25 photo stack! @Phil_G is right that the bottom left looks a little like a canyon in a grand landscape but I was also tempted to try a crop. Not sure it’s better, maybe a little tight but the middle flat section made me think of a frozen lake. Thanks again for posting I am enjoying this very much.
David, this is somewhere between 6 and 9 inches (15 - 22 cm) on the long axis . Had it been straight down, only a single shot would have worked.
Mark, I love the colors, textures and patterns in this image, particularly the prismatic areas. I will use this image as inspiration for some ice photography as soon as the temperature here allows. Since you elected to use a 25 shot stack, can you tell me the approximate depth from near to far focus? .
Very cool, Mark. It looks like a rock thin section viewed with a polarizing microscope.
But would you have gotten the iridescent colors if viewed straight down?
@Bonnie_Lampley, in this case, there is little if any iridescence due to birefringence. This was a low contrast raw file where Adobe automatically adds saturation as I expand the histogram and I didn’t desaturate to compensate. I’ve added a 25 point (in LR) desaturated version, which is both more realistic and more subtle. I’m liking the reduced blue, especially.
@Robert_Betka, since I don’t know either the shooting angle or the physical size, I can’t do the geometric calculation, a rough estimate would be in the 1 -2 inch range.
This is a really fine abstract, Mark. I agree that the reduced saturation version is better. The yellows and blues were too strong. There is a brighter area on the lower left edge you might want to deal with, but no big deal.
