This Camera Lens is Made of Iceberg Ice… and It Actually Works

Photographer Mathieu Stern is a fan of creating strange lenses, but his latest creation is quite unusual, even by his standards. Stern visited Iceland and created a working lens out of ice from an iceberg.

Stern says it all started with the idea: “If glass can focus light, then ice should do it too.”

He then set to work seeing if he could actually make it happen. The first step was 3D printing a custom lens body that’s designed to hold ice within as its main lens element.

Stern also hacked an ice sphere maker to create optical half spheres.

It took Stern 6 months of tweaking to get the right tools and an ice lens of the right shape with the right focus distance.

This summer, Stern took his creation to Iceland in hopes of using the clear ice found in the glaciers and icebergs there. Once on a beach, it took 45 minutes to melt each piece of ice with the ice sphere maker.

After 5 hours of failing to create a working lens — 4 of them broke after being placed in the mold — Stern finally created a working lens.

The lens has a total life span of about 1 minute before it melts and doesn’t work properly anymore. Here are some photos Stern captured with the ice lens:

Stern was amazed by the images he was able to capture through the lens, saying: “Of course [the photos] are not sharp or clean like a modern lens, but they are amazing when you know it’s just a piece of ice that focused light.”

You can find more of Stern’s experiments on his website and YouTube channel.