We've had pretty rubbish weather for the last few days, strong winds and quite a bit of snow. My latest 4 day aurora workshop finished this morning and as I waved goodbye to my excellent clients I decided a trip to the lake was in order to see what was going on. The lake is now seriously frozen, the ice looks anywhere up to 1m thick in places and for the last few weeks it has been buried under snow unless you venture right out, not something I've been keen to do. Anyway, with the strong winds of the last few days I noticed lots of nice patches of dark ice showing close to the shore so I grabbed the camera and went out to see what was what.

There are hundreds of cracks on the surface where the ice expands and contracts, some are very fine and some quite wide and filled with snow. The cracks that go right through the ice are beautiful and create amazing patterns. I decided pretty quickly that I would capture these abstract shapes and go for a series of shots that would work well together. 

The ice varies in colour from deep blue with a slight green tint to almost white, I guess the difference is the amount of air bubbles in the ice and how the light is absorbed, less bubbles in the ice further out I presume makes for clearer ice?

Whatever the reason, the deep blues are amazing, the cracks filled with snow add stark contrast and the cracks deep under the surface glow beautifully.

I purposefully went for strong lines in these shots, last year I produced a series of images of leaves trapped in ice and they looked great printed large, I can see these printed on aluminium a couple of meters wide looking excellent, but then I like abstract images which helps!

I think that will do for now, I got quite a few shapes I like and I may look again if the weather stays bad. I like the idea of experimenting with very long exposures and catching the snow blowing across the ice surface so will try that next.