Icy colors

This is what it looks like with "correct" focus!

I agree that the unfocused image looks much more interesting. I find the low contrast area towards the bottom a bit distracting, but I'm not sure what you can do about it. How much closer can you get the focus and still see the caustic effect? Does the direction of the light make any difference? It is always fun to experiment, we could not do it to this extent in the film days, but now there are so many new vistas that open up. Thanks for sharing!!

Creative, unique and cool abstract, Roel. I think this is very well captured.

This looks like a Hubble shot of deep space, Roel. The colors and lines work wonderfully. I would push the contrast further in the original post, mostly deepening the blacks to add some more pop to all those great colors. This is a neat find and the first post adds some extra interest with all of the lines. I'm thinking that what you're seeing in the original post (presumably with the focus deeper into the ice) is the colors caused by thin film refraction on the surface with the details being the internal crystalline structure of the ice....but that's digging deeper than needed into a great catch of a fascinating optical phenomenon.

Thanks for the comments! I'll play with the issues you guys addressed!

Alberto, this was almost at closest focus distance, because in order to get this pattern, I needed to have the focus slightly in front of the ice. Direction of the camera was not important, but placement of the camera was, because not everywhere on the ice block would these nice colors turn up, which can be seen in the attached image.

Mark, I spoke about this photo with Les Cowley from Atmospheric Optics (great site if you don't know it already!) and he thought the colors were formed by a crack somewhere in the ice. I moved my hand over the surface of the ice to see if that made any difference, since I initially thought the same as you, that a thin layer of water was causing the pattern, but it didn't make any difference. The out of focus picture is actually focused in front of the ice, so It's not details inside the ice we're looking at. The surface of the ice is not perfectly flat, so some of the structures function as "lenses" focusing the light at a small distance from the ice, which is why I captured them while having the focus in front of the ice. It would not have worked with perfectly flat ice. In the same way, very gentle waves on the water surface produce these beautiful caustics on the bottom of shallow lakes and streams.

Roel, I've spent a fair amount of time on the Atmospheric Optics site and it is indeed an excellent source for understanding and describing atmospheric optical phenomena. You say that this was a local phenomena (location specific, not angle specific), that offers another possibility...maybe a thin film of oil got frozen inside the ice in a few places or as Les says, an internal crack is present (as long as the separation between crack surfaces was very small and the crack was in a plane and roughly parallel to the surface). The problem with not knowing what caused this is that it will take sheer luck to see something like this again. I'm also fascinated that your focus is "in front" of the ice surface in the original post...another optical mystery.

Roel: Really well seen and a fine capture of an intriguing subject. 2 thumbs up! >=))>

Hi Roel; A very creative & cool abstract, enjoyed all the discussions about the optical phenomena of this image..


Albert Darmo
Canada

beautiful !

Amazing, indeed. Really nice take on this. The 'oof' version is far superior to the in focus one. Great discovery