Toy Land Ice Sculpture

Saturday was Holidays in Halifax. Every year they have an ice sculpture masterpiece. Here you can see it was Toy Land themed. A train in the foreground, an airplane, a soldier in the background and I think a pig and reindeer. You can click here and here to see photos of last year’s ice sculpture.

Did I mention it was cold. Did I say cold…it was bitterly cold! I’m guessing it was only around 20 degrees at best. I had plenty of layers on so most of my body was warm but my hands were freezing. I’m not sure if there are special photographer gloves or not out there. I had to take my gloves off every time I took a photo and once I did my hands never warmed back up. I thought there wouldn’t be as many people this year because of the cold but there were a lot more people than last year. The buildings were packed with people trying to keep warm. I figured there wouldn’t be a lot of people standing outside in front of the ice sculpture display but I was wrong. I actually had to keep waiting for people to come and go so I could get up front and take a few long exposure photos.

For this image I had to combine two images in Photoshop. One image was the original exposed image (pretty much what you see here) and another where everything was underexposed except for the airplane. In the original photo the airplane was completely washed out (seeing as it has a bright white light pointed at it). I layered the images in Photoshop, added then masked out the overexposed airplane to reveal the better exposed version below it.