This weekend was the Clarks Summit Festival of Ice, a street fair that I became quite acquainted with since Mandy was doing PR/social media work for it. Spent about two hours over there this morning and was very impressed – it’s great to see a community come together and put on a festival as nice as this one. Nothing too fancy, but it’s obvious that a lot of hard working people really put in effort and care to make it work.
Being an ice festival, the highlight was the ice carvings, which were nothing short of incredible. They lined the sponsoring businesses on the main street, so it was easy to stroll along and check out the sculptures, and then of course check out the shops as well. (Since they were giving away cookies and coco at many, I wasn’t too opposed to the commercial aspect of this!) This year’s theme was “Under the Big Top,” so all the carvings have a circus theme, which made for some fun ones.
For me, the real highlight was the live ice carving demonstration. Talk about talent and vision, these are people who take plain blocks of ice and turn them into art! If that isn’t skill, I don’t know what is. To make matters even cooler, the carving tool of choice is a chainsaw. An electric chainsaw, to be sure, but still ranking very high on the coolness scale. One of those babies goes through ice like it’s butter, ice-dust spraying everywhere, and it’s amazing how fast the blocks begin to take shape.
They fine-tune the carving afterwards using electric disk sanders and routers, and then there’s a whole procedure for cleaning and polishing the ice (we got cold and left before that part). Suffice to say, the guy giving the demonstration made it look easy enough; he’d stare at the block, tilt his head, make a few cuts, chunks came off, details appeared, and an hour later there was a train carved out of the block. Makes me think that perhaps I should give it at try – Mandy thinks that photographer is a intense hobby, wait until she comes home to find me in the backyard with a block of ice and a chainsaw!
Maybe not. Perhaps I’ll start small, with some ice cubes and the Dremel tool…
Photographically, these were all shot with the 400D + 50mm Mk I; f/4, ISO 400, Av mode with +.7 EC dialed in, to keep the ice bright. I like the pairing of the 400D + 50mm; the small lens on the smaller camera body feels better balanced to me. I am discovering how much I like working with the prime and it’s ability to grab ultra-shallow DOF. The real challenge of the day was capturing detail in the carvings – ice is very trick to shoot in a way that shows the shape and especially details; dark backgrounds help a lot, but even them some of the photos were just too hard to identify.
