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Month: March 2017

Watching Water Freeze

The freezing and melting of water, as seen with birefringnce and time-lapse photography.

Feathery scimitar display.

To date, I’ve been content to set water out overnight and examine nature’s icy creations in the morning. A late February warm spell made this proceedure impossible, with unseasonably warm overnight temperatures that turned my liquid water into puddles of slightly colder water. Nice, I guess, but not what I was after for a photographic subject.

Early March featured a nice cold snap and I returned to laying out sheets glass covered in water in the evening. After almost 2 weeks of an early onset spring induced ice-photography hiatus, impatience had set in and I couldn’t wait until morning. Bedtime on hold, I started neurotically checking the state of my ice-to-be every few minutes to see what was happening.

It was delightful.

On to the freeze-watching, which includes time-lapse videos.

That Icy Birefringent Palette

An idyllic walk through cycling colours.

A thin film of soap in a wire loop has the same swirly colours you find in birefringent ice, but a little more organized.

If the crazy colour palette in the header image looks familiar, you’ve either been looking at my past posts dealing with the birefringence of ice, or you remember playing with soap bubbles as a kid (of any age). Or maybe you played with oil slicks, they’re trippy too.

There’s a fancy physics reason for this, with soap film, oil slicks, and these ice photos, the colours are the result of light waves ‘destructively or constructively interfering’ in fun ways to get a spectrum ranging from black, to white, to a tobacco colour, through a classy mauve, over a deep sky blue then a warm yellow, past a pretty pink, then a lighter tasteful blue, finally more or less alternating between neon greens and pinks, becoming duller and duller with each cycle.

See a batch of photos ranging through this spectrum