Abraham Lake has been shot nearly to death by photographers, what with it being world-famous for its ice bubbles formations and all, but I haven't ever shot those yet. I've seen them tons of other places before, but on this day I did find the area around Abraham to be fascinating. I eventually decided on this 6-shot focus-stacked stitch combo of images for a super-wide perspective on the famous peak. I won't lie either, this was ridiculously hard to put together and some artistic liberties had to be taken. Still though, it represents a very real scene I hadn't ever got the chance to shoot before nor seen. What had happened to cause this crazy ice formation was a part of the lakeshore which had these 5ft-high wooden posts stuck in the ground had picked up some huge and freezing wave action earlier in the season when the water was exposed and higher on the receding shoreline. It left behind these crazy ice-mushrooms about 5ft. high. To get INSIDE of one require some trickery though, so these were almost totally blind shots, with the camera only stuck through a small hole in the base of one of the formations and me making my best guesses on the stitch and two focus points I took for each foreground shot. After at least a few tries over a hour or so I got it well enough to work with. When I first took the shot the light was REALLY bright on the icicles, but fortunately the sun was up outside and snow was blowing 40mph in waves up the frozen lake below, which you can see in the distance at high res here. That added that misty atmosphere in back I was able to brighten and accentuate to compensate for the crazy brightness and flare I had to control off the icicles. Thanks for looking. Compression and low res not doing us any favors here!
