The ice abstracts that appear in this book were all taken during a particularly busy time for me (both at work, at my "day job" as a physicist, and at home, where my wife and I are raising two small, and very raucous, boys). The abstracts are thus, for me, equivalents of an inner need to release pent-up stress and a yearning to escape to distant lands.

It is ironic that these abstracts might easily be mistaken for a literal depiction of a frozen Himalayan landscape; for it was precisely in hopes of finding such Himalayan-like landscapes that I set out exploring the compositional possibilities of bucket-fulls of melting cocktail ice.

After spending a few weeks capturing and processing the images - and living with a dozen or so prints on the wall (a common "trick" among photographers to help judge the "staying power" of an image) - these quasi-realistic depictions of frozen distant lands quietly, almost imperceptively, transformed themselves, in my mind's eye, into abstracts of a different form: ephemeral glimpses of frozen surrealities.