Blue ice

One of my favorite subjects to photograph in nature is blue ice. Iceland, Antarctica, Alaska, Patagonia -- no matter where I encounter glacial ice, it's a thrill to look for the most dynamic graphic shapes and to capture this kind of beauty. This glacier is in Alaska. I took this shot with my medium format film camera several years before I went digital and before we had ever heard of focus stacking. The main consideration here was depth of field. To make this composition successful, the foreground ice had to be as sharp as the background landscape. I used f/32 on a lens equivalent to a 20mm focal length (a 43mm wide angle on the Mamiay 7). The combination of an wide lens plus the small f/stop gave me the DOF I wanted. I used a tripod, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film, and the shutter speed was unrecorded, but it was probably around 1/2 second. The colors are intensely blue because I was using daylight balanced film in a deeply overcast lighting condition.