ice sculptures with eyes carved on both sides will often appear to have two flounder-like eyes in photos; you have to be careful sometimes with backside detailing!
updated 7/29/23, mostly with seo and stuff
backside detail can give your sculpture flounder eyes
You ever look at a profile-view ice sculpture of an animal, and it looks like it has two eyes because you can see the eye on the front side and the eye from the backside, shifted slightly to the side? I call this Flounder Eye Syndrome and it’s an annoying optical situation caused by the curvature of the ice, where the backside detail is slightly offset from the frontside detailing.
The angelfish ice sculpture above shows a little bit of this condition. Most people at the event won’t really notice it because they’re moving around the sculpture, but it really shows up in photos sometimes. It’s important because the eye of the subject is often one of the most important parts of the sculpture. If the eye looks screwed up, the whole sculpture photo can look off.
4 backside detail approaches
So how do you deal with it? Well, at an ice sculpting tradeshow in Memphis in 2001, Mike Pizzuto did a presentation on photographing ice sculptures. His suggestion for this situation was to detail the front of the sculpture, then take a picture, then detail the back of the sculpture. That’s a good idea, but the method won’t always work, especially if you’re trying to get a good photo of the sculpture in place, just before the event begins. It also adds a lot of time to the sculpting process, since you have to stop carving midstream and prepare the sculpture for a photo.
I do like Mike’s idea, but I have three other suggestions that might work better for various situations.
The first is to not detail the back at all, especially if the sculpture is to be placed against a wall or if the event guests won’t otherwise go behind the sculpture. You can put some detail or no detail, but avoid detailing sections that will mess up how the sculpture looks from the front. This is my favorite solution, but it doesn’t work for every situation.
Incidentally, when I carved with Junichi and Shinichi in Alaska in 2004, Junichi had us do a variation of this approach. We added very little detail to the back of our huge “Ancestral Spirit” sculpture. We did, however, texture the back of the sculpture, which acted to diffuse lighting from the back of the sculpture and made photos of it generally much better, since the light was distributed more evenly through the sculpture.
The second suggestion is to detail the back, but avoid hard, deep cuts that really catch the light and just concentrate on the overall forms. That way, it’s basically a complete sculpture, but you’re not creating so much distracting backside detail that will show through the front.
The final suggestion is to detail the whole sculpture, backside detail and all, but take care at what angle you take your picture from. Yes, this one in particular is far from a perfect solution; it’s even a little risky. There might not be a good vantage point for a photo. But if you are able to move to the right position, you can often hide distracting backside detail behind front side detail.
One last thing; if you’re photographing an ice sculpture of a flounder, well, then don’t even worry about it…
links and stuff
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