Monday, December 10, 2012

Frozen


The first frost came before the water lily leaves had gone, begun their fall through water, not air. Even some corpse flower buds remained. The ice holding them was a creased and pleated membrane, not a rigid sheet, the fish moved freely below it. 


















 



















 

19 comments:

Dale said...

Oh, my!

marja-leena said...

Gorgeous! I love the "creased and pleated membrane" as well as the colours and textures of the leaves.

Ellena said...

Wow! At the end the little bud could no longer hold its breath and came up for some air.

the polish chick said...

gorgeous.

Rouchswalwe said...

Amazingly beautiful, sweet Lucy! Thank goodness you were there with your camera to take us on a winter frog's ultimate cold weather holiday. Each photo opens up a wonderland for me.

NT said...

What beautiful pictures! Thank you!

Zhoen said...

Icy curtains, beautiful.

julia said...

Isn't natural beauty so much superior to anything man-made?

Jean said...

These are fabulous, both the colours and the forms.

Anonymous said...

Beautiful photographs!

Lucy said...

Thanks very much everyone. The colours are pretty accurate, they really were very deep and varied. I turned up the shadows quite a bit to offset the glare from the ice which made them a bit pale and blueish. That made the colours a bit over-saturated, so I turned the saturation down to more like it was originally. Today they are frozen again but are much more muted colours already, sort of sepia and parchment and mummy...

Mouse - but the photos are man-made! Normally I would, kind of, agree with you, except that many of the cultivated and domesticated plants and animals we see have been very much shaped by our influence, like Oscar Wilde's green carnation! And indeed, whenever we get hold of things and apply our perception and ideas about them, never mind our cameras and our photo-editing programmes, to them, they acquire an element of artifice, or construct, or something like that.

Even so, accepting the distinction, living among a lot of natural sights and objects, which was my choice, I find I often do crave man-made stuff, it seems in some ways more varied and unpredictable and stimulating. But when I lived in an urban, constructed environment, I found it quite oppressive and really hungered for more natural surroundings, and inasmuch as intensively farmed Brittany fits the bill, that's still my preference.

Nimble said...

Brr. Lovely texture to the ice.

HKatz said...

Love these photos, how the water seems covered in cellophane. Also the colors. There's something Oriental about it; the colors like lacquer and wood.

Catalyst said...

But don't they get cold?

Clive Hicks-Jenkins said...

These look like details from a Renaissance painting. Gorgeous!

Unknown said...

I would love to see an album or small book of these photographs . They require no captions. What rich and rare textiles they would make!

Anne said...

Wonderful photos. I suppose the goldfish don't mind being just above freezing.

Lucy said...

Thanks again.

The goldfish have certainly survived much colder temperatures and harder freezes than this. I think as long as they have enough oxygen in the water and it doesn't quite freeze solid, they're OK. It's recommended you float a ball or something on the surface during prolonged cold weather to keep a hole in the ice.

zephyr said...

Beautiful!!
i really love looking at...no, studying these