Night in Harbin's ice festival Photo

Photographer’s Note

The Harbin Ice Festival is an annual event held in Harbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang Province - 1.400 km Nort of Beijing-, in January. The city then boasts its neat, impressive and artistic ice and snow sculptures, carvings, and buildings in parks and on frozen rivers. World famous monuments like some grand cathedrals, pyramids, Potala Palace in Tibet and the Great Wall are all carved out of ice, in spectacularly giant sizes! Some of them, embedded with colored lights, are designed for nighttime observation.

Harbin is actually where China meets Russia: Harbin is close to Siberia and winters are extremely cold. Temperatures regularly fall below -30°C. Consequently the main difficulty for shooting any scene in Harbin during the Ice Festival is to be able to cope with the ambient deep-freeze cold and the strong winds: the life of batteries is terribly shortened, fingers stick to the camera body while one’s own body just feels like a popsicle.

Enjoy this picture in the warmth of your home!

munki, azuri, brasiu, Yleloup, thomeryon, brevbrev14, ellie, lilimih33 has marked this note useful

Critiques | Translate

bkester (740) 2006-02-18 4:31

dear detay,
this is an amazing picture, the lights are sharp, the green glow is great, but what i like most are the black shadows of people watching the scene. well done!

Chips12 (284) 2006-02-18 4:36

Waouw
Rien à dire le point de vue est superbes et les coluleurs de toute beauté

Bravo

Pierre

munki (1287) 2006-02-18 4:55

Hi Detay,

Great shot with unbeliable colours and light.
Thanks for sharing.
Marcos

azuri (1598) 2006-02-18 6:46

Beautiful shot, Detay! I cannot imagine that everything here are from ice! Great colours, light, point of view! Very sharp also! And thanks for interesting note!

Natalia

vagabondtravels (6115) 2006-02-18 7:29

Great night shot. I like the colors. I would love to go to this festival!

Modacolor51 (1309) 2006-02-18 11:14

Great night shot. I like the colors. I would love to go to this festival!

brasiu (65) 2006-02-28 15:45

Really a good shot for the colour mix and a good description. Thanks to share this far place from my home. Any problem with this low temperature for the camera?

Yleloup (191) 2006-03-01 9:27

Excellent DOF.
Nice colors. TFS.

YL

Tweety (3472) 2006-04-25 2:09

Superbe photo avec des couleurs bien chaudes. Je suis surpris par la netteté des personnages avec 2s de pause ; à croire qu'ils ont été congelés eux aussi !

thomeryon (1287) 2006-04-26 15:15

Bonjour
Superbe féérie chinoise, l'image si chaude ne reflete pas les conditions climatiques de la prise de vue et tant mieux!
On imagine pas la chine ainsi , vive Michel Detay et T.E.
Pascal

brevbrev14 (372) 2006-09-08 9:32

HI MICHEL!very nice this image!i can only to imagine your difficults to made this shot!!Fantastic lights and colours here!Beautiful compo!!It seems to be in a Disney Cartoon!
Ciao

Valeria

ellie (60) 2006-09-29 7:46

You have really opened my eyes to a part of the world I had not known. I see this and want to see a hundred more of this ice festival. And your commentary is superb, and I love how you let us know of the photographer's side of this lovely picture.

lilimih33 (9874) 2006-10-27 14:40

Hello Detay! This is very beautiful coloured picture! Good point of view and nice place! Well done! Lili