Mesmerizing Photos of Frozen Flowers by Mo Devlin

When you hear the term flower photography, it probably doesn’t inspire a particularly powerful reaction. There are plenty of gorgeous images of flowers — from wildflower fields to beautifully-lit bouquets — and so the genre isn’t somewhere we usually look for inspiration.

That is, until we ran across photographer Mo Devlin‘s stunning shots of frozen flowers.

Devlin isn’t primarily known for these shots. In fact, if you Google him, you’ll immediately come up with some beautiful photos of fish (that are well-worth taking a look at, by the way). For some reason, however, it was the frozen flowers that captivated our imagination.

                            

He’s photographed everything from posies, to daffodils, to roses; all frozen in blocks of ice. We’re not sure why, but the ice just adds a certain something to the photos that draws you in. We caught up with Mo to ask about the project, and he was kind enough to answer a few questions about this work:

PetaPixel: What inspired you to embark on this project in the first place?

Mo Devlin: I’ve always enjoyed photographing flowers. The idea that has now developed into an ongoing project actually started when I tried to freeze an old Seiko watch. At the time I also froze a single rose in my wife’s flower vase. The vase froze and broke, leaving me with more or less a column of ice with the rose frozen inside… and an upset wife. I took some photos of the flower and liked the way they looked.

PP: What kind of challenges have you faced trying to capture these images?

MD: The problem that I had was that the ice that encased the rose was for the most part, cloudy with clear edges. I did some research and found that ordinary tap water, when frozen, captures all the minerals and impurities and clouds the ice. I tried boiling the water, but had mixed results. I ended up using distilled water and had some of my best results. I continue to tweak the aquatic formula to improve clarity.

Clarity comes not only from the liquid, but also the shape and size of the container. I started calling the frozen creations “flower pucks” primarily because the majority of my initial attempts were done in small Pyrex custard bowls. Over the past year I have frozen blooms in containers as small as an ice cube and as large as a one gallon plastic container. Each freezes differently