About the Image(s)

I froze this a couple months ago . It’s been sitting in the freezer till this past week.

“Old Yellah
I’ve always been drawn to ice, especially when it gets hold of a flower. Ice doesn’t have to melt to disappear. Even below freezing it still gives off vapor, so water molecules leave the solid surface and go straight into the air. That solid-to-gas step is sublimation. A household freezer, particularly a frost-free one, keeps the air cold and dry, and it often runs a heater or fan to pull moisture out. I shot this a couple of months ago and then got lazy about photographing it. Over those months the dry freezer air kept pulling water out of the ice, so the block slowly shrank.
That vapor doesn’t just hang there. When it hits something colder than the air, or when the freezer dips a little, it freezes straight back into ice. It never becomes water first. That jump from vapor to ice is deposition. The new ice doesn’t lay down as a smooth sheet. It starts at scattered spots and grows out as tiny needles, flat plates, or fern shapes. The vapor arrives slowly, and it sticks more easily to the tips and edges of crystals that are already there, so those crystals keep branching instead of filling in flat. They scatter light and look soft and fuzzy. That’s hoarfrost.
So two things are happening at once. Sublimation feeds vapor from the block, and from any other ice in the freezer. Deposition grows hoarfrost back onto the coldest parts of that same surface, often thickest where air can move and where the ice is a little colder than the air around it. It’s the same cycle that causes freezer burn: ice leaves the food, and the vapor may settle somewhere else as frost.
That’s how the sausage is made. From the photo side, I just call this old ice. I’d like to say it’s a clever technique I developed, but old ice usually shows up when I’m too lazy, or too distracted, to shoot right away. This sunflower came pretty close to the surface to the sublimation. I do like the texture of hoarfrost. And a pro tip: I always keep a baker’s torch handy when I photograph. I melt out small cracks, and I’ll even melt the hoarfrost back if it doesn’t suit my eye.
Photo with my new Nikon Z6III, 105mm lens, GoDox SL60 using a snoot to center the light. “