Some time ago, Buddy Rasmussen sent me some cds that he thought were full of his ice sculpture photos. Well, he sent me the wrong cds and I’ve appreciated it ever since! Not that I didn’t want to see pictures of Buddy’s work; anybody who’s seen the former National champion and Ice Magic 2009 winner’s ice knows that it’s definitely worth a lot of looks. Buddy, though, sent me a couple of photo collections that I didn’t know existed and that I was very excited to see. On one cd was a photoset from the 2002 Olympic competition. I’d seen lots of photos from that event (which I recently posted) and I have some photos that I took myself as well (somewhere...). What was different about these new photos was that they were taken from an ice carver’s point of view, meaning that there were a lot of photos that focused on the technical aspects of the sculptures. There were lots of tool photos and some sequence photos. For example, there are 50 photos of nearly the entire sequence of Junichi’s sculpture! These were the photos that I would have tried to take if I hadn’t been otherwise occupied. And all the photos were nicely organized according to sculpture and headed by a shot of each team’s page in the event program.

    Once I saw these pictures, I had to find out who took them. After asking around (Buddy wasn’t sure where he got them) I found out that Louis Manzoni of Art in Ice in Rhode Island had taken them. I got a hold of Louis and he graciously allowed me to use them on my site. I was looking forward to adding them as soon as possible, but then, however, I think I had some significant technical problems with my website, so it was a while before I had an opportunity to add any new content; I had to fix the site first. By the time I was back to adding new content again, the cds had been filed away and I was working on different parts of the site.

    Between now and then, I got to see Louis win a world championship in Alaska. He was part of the team, which included Steve Brice, Louis, Jeff Stahl, and Tom Lewando, that created “Jonah” in the multiblock event in 2008. It was a pretty easy choice for the judges, I think. Their team, despite the challenging conditions (it was very warm at the end), had a fantastic sculpture that they were able to protect from the worst of the warmth while many other teams suffered.

    Louis took so many good photos that I’ll be dividing them up into several galleries in the near future. The first is a small collection of the medal winning sculptures and sculptors. Thanks Louis!

P.S. I mentioned a couple of sets of photos that Louis took. The shots from Provo were on one cd. In some ways, the pictures on the other cd were even better! Keep an eye out for those photos...