Before I removed it
the ice in the bird bath gave me opportunities to play
with an abstract world.
Getting this close with a lens
i wonder...
If i put fresh water in
then stood there as the temperature dropped
could i see it happen?
Or would my eyes give up with all that waiting
and begin to wander out of necessity
in order to regain the ability to actually see what it is i am staring at
If, glancing away for just an instant
would i miss the moment?
That point in time when air bubbles are caught?
How curious that the mysteriously slow process of liquid turning solid
is fast enough to catch airy bubbles
but it is too slow to see.
And how can i hope to catch the ice creating its own version of bubbles?
And then i start thinking about other moments:
seed coats bursting
buds swelling
petals unfurling...
who has the eyes to witness those transitions
that growth
when before becomes after and the unseen is quietly just...there?
What else is there
beneath my feet
on a branch
next to a leaf
waiting within the crack of a stone
that i have yet to witness with my own eyes?
P.S. i'm sitting here at my desk and from time to time i look out the window at the glistening, ice covered tree branches. Sometime during last night and now, the drips running off each glazed twig, have been frozen into a string of short icicles. The air temperature is still below freezing and freezing rain is still falling. i stare as long as i can at one icicle, determined to see a drip caught and frozen...i observe the liquid accumulate, the drip grows larger and larger, then falls...but where's the transformation of a drip into another (or a few) millimeter(s) of icicle?? i've been watching the same icicle for the past hour...if it were 1/8 inch longer, it would be touching the lower branch...but it's not. So how did four inches form in less than 5 hours??
Are a few molecules from each drop harvested/transformed at each drip? i'm sure that one of you has learned some bit of science that i missed...which explains it all in a nice, tidy sentence...or two..and i'm just a silly obsessed person who would should put down her lenses.
Ah no, not obsessed. I love this attention to the finer details of life that you are so good at. That's one of the reasons I keep coming back!! :o) The ice bubbles are beautiful.
Posted by: Terri | February 02, 2008 at 01:41 AM
Clever patient soul you are!
I love timelapse photography for this reason, but I've never seen any of ice forming, it must exist somewhere...
Posted by: Lucy | February 03, 2008 at 10:24 AM
Oh, wow. This is fantastic. Just super! :)
Posted by: Wendee | February 05, 2008 at 12:09 AM
"Ice changes form with dropping temperatures. In hexagonal ice, the usual form, the oxygen atoms are fixed in position, but the hydrogen bonds between water molecules are continually breaking and reattaching, tens of thousands of times a second."
I suppose we think of ice as water going into some kind of suspended animation when it doesn't happen that way at all :)
Your images are like looking into another, purer world Zeph. These are beautiful.
Posted by: Elaine | February 06, 2008 at 03:15 AM
Thank you all!
Lucy, i don't know that i'm that patient...just required to spend hours at this desk and fortunate that i can look up from time to time and observe something different each moment...
E, thank you for this wonderful piece of science!!! i love it and i'm going to attempt to memorize it
Posted by: zephyr | February 06, 2008 at 08:38 AM