Hot or Cold?

The answer: cold (it’s a macro photograph of an ice cube)

How to make an ice cube appear hot:

  1. Add a few coffee grounds to the water in an ice-cube tray and put it in a freezer. This tints the water a reddish-orange color and provides areas of contrast. If you want your photos to appear like the sun, trays that produce rounded cubes are best.
  2. Once frozen, remove a cube from the tray and place it in a darkened room with a dim light source behind it. Lit from behind, the ice and grounds appear like solar imagery or perhaps molten metal.
  3. Using a tripod, position your camera and compose an image of the cube.
  4. While taking a long exposure, slowly breath on the cube. This produces vapor next to the cube, like your breath on a cold day. The vapor catches the coffee-tinted light, forming a visible corona.
  5. You now have a photo of an ice cube that looks hot.

To see an image that looks similar, but was produced in a completely different manner, click here.

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