How It Starts

I've wondered how ice sculptors begin to extract an image from a plain block. Minutes before this was taken, one of the men did a tracing of a cardboard template onto the ice. Hard to imagine how they can execute the design freehand and get it exact.

I wanted to get in closer but I could not get around the person in the left foreground. Don't know why she was shooting phone video. She was carrying a Canon 5D Mark IV (US$ 3,300) with an expensive, high-end L series lens. (I'm ex-Canon.) It can take fabulous video.