NEW: Check out the gallery of photographs by Patrick Endres (added June 13)

    In a recent email, Aaron Costic calls Alaska’s Patrick Endres “the best ice photog on the planet!” Junichi Nakamura’s book, “Visions of the Master”, has a lot of Endres’ pictures. I used to think (until Junichi’s book came out) that Endres’ and Kris Capps small softcover book: “The Making of Ice Art: Sculpting the Arctic Diamond” was perhaps the best book on ice sculpture that I’d ever seen. So when I got a FedEx package from Endres’ Alaska Photo Graphics a couple days ago, I was pretty excited. Inside was an 11”x16” print of the photo above. I’d waited quite a while to get a high quality print of our sculpture from 2004, but it didn’t diminish the excitement of opening the package.

    The quality and sharpness of the print was fantastic! I’ve spend a lot of time trying to get quality photos of a few of my ice sculptures and I’ve had some success. But Endres’ work is the gold standard that I aspire to. I can put my photo next to the photo I just got and know that I’ve still got a long way to go. Take a look at some of the photos at the links below, and you’ll start to see what I mean.

1. 2003 photos (42 images: World IceArt Championships)
   

2. 2004 photos (76 images: World IceArt Championships)
   

3. 2005 photos (44 images: World IceArt Championships, Aurora Ice Hotel, natural ice)
   

4. 2006 photos (35 images: World IceArt Championships)
   

5. 2007 photos (26 images: World IceArt Championships)
   

    These links are based on search criteria that may not be perfect. Today, I found a couple of pictures of Junichi and me working on “Ancestral Spirit.” Several days ago, I’d done a search and assumed that I’d found everything, but I missed these. But the keywords work pretty well for the more recent photos and the site (http://www.alaskaphotographics.com) has lots of fantastic ice carving photos (and lots more of Alaska as well.) If you plug “fairbanks” and “ice” into the search criteria, you get over 400 results, most of which are ice sculptures. These results include pictures of some remarkable pieces from before 2003 including “The Joust” and “Fear of the Sword.”

    Years ago, on my ice carving sketchbook, I taped a small photo of Mark Daukas’ “Thor” sculpture from the 1994 Olympic ice carving event. At the time, that was one of the best ice sculpture photos I’d ever seen and I used to look at it so that I would remember to keep trying to improve. It’s still a great photo, but now there’s lots more on Endres’ site. My advice would be to pick one or two of your favorite photos and order a print. It doesn’t have to be a poster-sized print, sizes for the fine art prints start at 8x12 ($40, shipping included in the U.S.) You’ll see sculptural details in the print that you could never see on the web. It will give you a new appreciation for the skill that goes into the World IceArt Championship sculptures and Endres’ photos and perhaps provide some inspiration for your ice carving.