As those of you who follow my work know, I enjoy photographing ice and am continually amazed by the many ways it forms. I thought I’d “seen it all,” but this week a friend posted an image from a nearby reservoir that made it clear I had not.

The water levels on the reservoir are subject to fairly rapid variations so, when the edges of the lake froze and then the water dropped, much of the ice was “floating” in air, left 18″ above the ground; as if that was not remarkable enough, several nights of sublimation—direct evaporation of ice—in air temperatures in the teens caused thinning of some of that ice to the thickness of tissue paper—so thin and paperlike that small sheets of it were literally fluttering in the air!

It was the patterns that blew me away, formed as the temperatures changed a degree or two and…