ABOUT THE ARTIST

I received my first 35 mm SLR camera in 1991 which I inherited from my father. It was a Canon AE-1 with multiple lenses. With a fascination for the outdoors, I took hundreds of landscape and nature photographs. I really had no idea what I was doing with a camera, just read a few books and started experimenting. I traveled across the country 8 times by van seeing most all the national parks and shooting photographs. I also traveled every year to Costa Rica.

About 5 years ago I started shooting ice crystals in an apartment I was living in. I found all the different formations very interesting and really like another world. There was never a crystal scene that was the same. Every other day a new set of crystals would grow. I later even figured out how to grow them myself and in the right conditions could actually pour water on the window and see them grow instantly. I also found that it became a little boring just shooting the same scene behind the crystals. So I had my brother weld me a special frame. I would then lower the frozen storm windows down from my 3rd floor apartment and put the window into the frame. This frame was then mounted on a tripod and I would take it around the city to get different backdrops. At this time period I also stared using computers and found I could save lots of money by scanning and printing my images. I found that my images were not as sharp as I wanted at the 35mm size and decided to purchase a medium format 6x7 Pentax camera. With this much larger slide size format, I now had the ability to produce very large sharp prints.

Then came the day I had to move from my apartment into my new home. I had lost the special environment which had grown the crystals. I decided to stick with ice in a further study and came up with the idea to freeze flowers in ice. The last 6 months I have been experimenting with different evolutions of the ice, lighting technics and camera depth of feel. What one sees on this website is the beginning.

Please drop me a note if you are inspired or have any thoughts, Best regards, Chris
chris@IcePoetry.com