A few months ago, I was commissioned out to produce some art pieces for a potential client. The direction was, ice, ice and more ice. This took me onto the path of creating a set of images which was somewhat unfamiliar to me, even though normal ice is something that most of of use in some manner every day. I really wanted to capture the essence of glacial ice, but knew it may be difficult being that I live in Florida (a place known very much for its lack of ice or even cold weather for that matter)

One day while I had some free time between shoots in Orlando, I decided to work around the best way to complete this project. My friend Josh had an extra large freezer in his garage, so I began by finding the largest container possible. I filled it up with water, put it in the freezer, and waited for it to freeze. And kept waiting. And then I waited some more. (Waiting for ice to freeze is almost worse than watching a pot boil!) After the ice was completely frozen I took it out and set up my make shift studio to attempt to capture what I wanted. I set up a clear glass table on top of 2 bar stools and lit it from the top with a speed light being diffused through a soft box. I knew I wanted to achieve a blue tint to the ice, so I under lit the table with a gelled bare speed light sitting on the floor and pointing up at the glass. Then I took a hammer to the ice, found some pieces I wanted to photograph and laid them out on the glass to start shooting. I ended up making these images with the Nikkor 40mm 2.8 micro lens, and I was pretty surprised on how everything came out. One word of advice to anyone who takes this on as a project, make sure that your table is level! Before I leveled out the table I had ice sliding around everywhere as it was melting on the glass, but the final product was well worth the mess. At the end of the day I had a library of images to provide to the client, as well as additional images to keep for myself!

If you ever find yourself in Beaver Creek, Colorado, you can see some of the images I took printed extremely large on the walls of the Ritz Carlton Bachelor Gulch and if you would like to purchase your own prints, I have a few select items for sale at http://photosbychrismartin.bigcartel.com printed on some amazing, high quality metallic paper.