colour – Brian Robin

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

Birefringence of Homemade Ice

Or how to manipulate ice thickness for coloursplosions….

Ice from a river’s edge, Feb 2016. Pretty enough, but what other shapes can we get? Can I get them on my front porch?

After my initial foray into the Birefringence of River Ice early in 2016, it was fairly clear that the thicker parts of the ice end up…clear, and it’s the thinner parts that liven up between crossed polarizers.

Nature does a fine job of making thin ice on river edges or the tops of puddles with endless interesting shapes to explore, but why not ‘make’ some thin ice and see what happens?

As a bonus, being able to make some thin ice at home means you can photograph it in your pajamas and no trudging off in the cold to a river or a puddle in search of a suitable piece of frozen water. Laziness for the win!

Snow Sliding On Windshields

Or the colour hidden under the white…

It’s snow pretty – especially when it’s on the other side of the field, out of shoveling range.

A fresh layer of snow overnight creates a magical winter wonderland to wake up to. It creates a fresh powder to record frisky animal tracks. It creates a crisp and refreshing chill in the air.

It also creates work.

Snowfall means shoveling the walks, steps, and sometimes the roof. It means blowing the laneway. It means cleaning off the car before you drive down said laneway in search of picturesque snow covered scenes.

Grumble. Grumble. Grumble.

Birefringence of River Ice

Or how I combat cold winter colour cravings….

Ice With Wavy Pattern on Rivers Edge — Standard issue ice found on the edge of a slow moving stream. Captivating greyscale patterns with a colourful secret!

I don’t mind our cold Ontario winters, in fact, I try pretty hard not to complain about freezing my buns off. This gives me the right to complain bitterly about the absurd heat and humidity we’ve had the past few summers – I can always add more layers of clothing to fight off -30°C, but I can only remove so many layers to combat +30°C before I start getting arrested.

What does get me down in the winter months is our overall lack of sunlight, and the dreary, overcast, chromatically-challenged days are more trying than a frozen beard.