When: The Snow & Ice Sculpture Festival opened its...ice gates on Friday, 23 November ‘07 and continued till Sunday 13 January ‘08.

click here to view indoor Snow and Ice Sculpture Festival

What: Each Festival has a theme. This year it was from the movie ‘Plop and the Pinguin’. Plop the gnome is a famous television figure either in Belgium or in the Netherlands. Studio100, the creator of Plop, has made several movies about this gnome and his friends.
The movie was the main theme of the Ice Sculpture festival but other important things, like Global Warming, were brought to the attention too.

Why: Yvan is always trying to improve his skills in panoramic photography. The Ice sculpture was a difficult subject, due to the continuous change of lights. As he recalls, another point of difficulty was the freezing cold temperature. After 2 hours of photographing in temperatures of -5 °C, his fingers and toes were freezing, but he kept shooting until it became obviously too difficult to trigger the camera. He is glad that he has done this project because the sculptures have melted now, but people can still virtually walk among them.

how/technical details: Camera used: Nikon D80 with Nikon 10,5 mm lens.
Manfrotto tripod and Manfrotto leveller. Pano Head: Nodal Ninja 3
Software: Ptgui, Photoshop and Flash Panorama Player. As he says "I like this player, due to it’s flexibility".

Yvan Van Hoorickx lives in Belgium near the coast, with Linda and their three kids. He started panoramic photographing 5 years ago and he now tries to make a profession out of it, always trying to photograph the extreme. He's a KAPer too (Kite Aerial Photographer) since 2000, using a kite to lift a camera to take aerial shots from a height between 20 and 250 metres, working under the nickname of Birdseye.be. Lately he added a large tripod Manfrotto to his equipment so that now he will have the chance to take panos from a height of 7.5 metres.

Links:
360vt.be
IceSculpture.be
BirdsEye.be
LaPalma-VirtualTour.nl
Email: info at 360vt.be