December 2nd, 2017 | Updated on April 6th, 2024
Marc Adamus said of this picture, taken at Abraham Lake, Banff, Canada: ‘Causing this crazy ice formation were 1.5m (5ft) high wooden trunks, which were stuck in the ground and had picked up some huge, freezing wave action earlier in the season when the water was exposed and higher on the receding shoreline. To get inside one of these tiny caves required some trickery, so this image comes from what were almost totally blind shots. I had to position the camera through a small hole in the base of one of the formations, and make my best guess on each frame to stitch, as well as the two focus points I needed for each foreground shot. After several tries over an hour or so, I got results that were good enough to work with. This was one of the hardest technical shots I’ve ever pulled off, especially considering the high winds and 14°F (-10°C) temperatures outside. I made a four-shot horizontal two-row stitch with the bottom two exposures being duplicated with a closer focus point. The camera was handheld but I positioned it on a rock and a chunk of ice’
