A bottle of corn syrup has been sitting on my kitchen counter for two months, but I repeatedly forgot to try the frozen bubble trick until this week. The stills and videos are online. The weather has to be cold for this to work - in the -10°C to -25°C range - and the air has to be calm or the bubbles will pop. You mix up a concoction and use a straw to blow bubbles onto a convenient surface; the ones that don't pop will slowly freeze, and the ice crystal formations are unique and infinitely variable.
Here's the formula I used: mix 35 ml of corn syrup with 200 ml warm water, add 35 ml dish soap and 2 T sugar. Stir. Cool in the freezer for a few minutes. The hardest part is learning to blow a bubble using a plastic straw. I made four 1-inch lengthwise cuts in one end, then splayed them back. This will usually allow the straw to pick up some of the viscous liquid, although it takes practice. Small bubbles are easier to blow, but larger bubbles are more fun.
After you do get a bubble to form, and while the freezing process is underway, you have a minute or two to play, so a little advance planning is required. Direct sun shining on the bubble is best. Backlighting is generally the most colourful and interesting. But then what? Most versions of this that I've seen include the entire bubble, and although beautiful, they all tend to look similar. But what if I used a tripod and macro lens stopped down a ridiculous amount and focused very closely? An attempt to abstract the frost crystals on the bubble's thin surface... light refracting from thousands of miniscule icy planes... the bubble's curvature eventually pushing the edges of my frame out of focus... why not?
The idea for a pano crop came later, based on where the interesting (and in focus) detail lay within my original framing. This is the bottom portion of the bubble; I've cropped out the base, where it sat on the flat railing of my front porch. The pinpoint coloured dots are not digital noise, but rather, tiny flashes of prismatic light from the ice crystals. Under normal circumstances I would seldom shoot at f/36, because loss of sharpness can be extreme at these tiny apertures. However, standing on my front porch in my winter parka and slippers at dawn in -20 temperatures while blowing bubbles can hardly be considered normal.
This bubble was about three and a half inches in diameter.
Photographed in Val Marie, Saskatchewan (Canada). Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission © 2020 James R. Page - all rights reserved.
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