Winter in southwestern Colorado has been quite cold this year—much colder compared to recent years. One benefit of all this cold weather is the chance to look for naturally occurring ice formations, or to try creating my own in our yard. While I generally consider myself to be a responsive photographer in which I exclusively react to the existing natural world around me, I occasionally like to experiment with photographing under slightly more controlled situations. With these ice experimentations, I consider my approach to be a partnership with nature in which I control some of the variables and then natural processes fill in the blanks.
Read MoreBackyard Abstracts: Photos From My Ice Farming Operation
Over the last few years, we have occasionally put a tub of water in our backyard during colder weather to see if it might create some opportunities for photographing ice patterns. We never put much effort into this approach to photography because it seemed like we could usually find something more interesting in a natural setting. Enter Adam Gibbs and the preview pages for his new book, Land & Light. In one of the sample spreads, Adam shares a beautiful photo of frost patterns and describes the “ice farming” operation behind its creation.
This story made me decide to put a bit more effort into our own ice farming operation, especially since we were in the middle of a stretch of very cold weather. As I started experimenting with some new ideas, I hoped we might be able to create the conditions for frilly frost to form, like Adam showed in the photo in his book preview. Likely because of the humidity differences between damp Vancouver Island and dry southwestern Colorado, that frost never materialized as I had envisioned. With more experimentation, I eventually found an approach that created some tiny wild patterns.
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