Ice Sculpture Abstractions — Toronto, Ontario

On Sat­ur­day Feb­ru­ary 26, 2012 I was lucky enough to be in Toronto, Ontario dur­ing the week­end when the Bloor-Yorkville Ice­fest was going on. The ice sculp­tures and sur­round­ing decor were sim­ply gor­geous, a fine art photographer’s wet dream I dare say. A friend of mine told me about the sculp­tures which were in a very pop­u­lar part of town where park­ing spots are as rare as flaw­less dia­monds. After look­ing for park­ing for 15 min­utes, I got fed up and almost left to shoot else­where. But I got trapped in a bumper to bumper traf­fic jam (a huge pet peeve) and it seemed like my only way out was a park­ing garage with a 15 dol­lar charge. Well thank­fully I just sighed and parked because it was by far the best 15 dol­lar invest­ment of my weekend.

The area was packed with peo­ple get­ting really close to the ice sculp­tures and packed with pissed off pho­tog­ra­phers who wanted to take unob­structed (peo­ple free) images of the ice-sculptures. As for myself, I was enthralled after the first frame. For me, the peo­ple added a level of abstrac­tion to the pho­tographs that made them much more inter­est­ing to my eye. They were unknow­ingly inter­act­ing with the ice sculp­tures for me.  I shot there for about 30 min­utes as dif­fer­ent peo­ple entered and exited the scene and I tried dif­fer­ent angles to get as much vari­ety as I could.

I’d like to thank the city of Toronto as well as the event’s spon­sors for putting on such a visu­ally awe­some event. Here are my 4 favourite pho­tos from the shoot.