... Moscow variant. Strong light pollution of the city causes bright sky at long exposured shots. For this picture i use 67 RAW shots, aligned with Hugin's "align_image_stack" utility and averaged. This allows to get Orion nebula's natural color, but it's size and details still unacceptable. Next time i'll try capturing this nebula with better camera settings and bigger series of source shots. Star colors looks better in original resolution: 1567 x 2093 pixels.

I wrote small post about averaging stack of shots here: english / russian.

Prints available at Artist website, RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com, Marketplace.500px.com.

Moscow Kremlin, october 2013. For better clarity and colors i averaged multiple shots for each exposure (2 shots for brightest and 8 for other 5 exposures, 42 shots total). I wrote small post about averaging stack of shots: english / russian.

View full map

Snowflake photo: The beauty of imperfection (2096 x 1572)

This is large snowflake of stellar dendrite type, 5 or 6 millimeters from tip to tip. It have one reduced branch, but gorgeous pattern in the center:

Crop of snowflake center in full size

7 identical RAW photos, taken as quick series, was aligned and averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio of this picture. Background: black woolen fabric, diffused light of gray winter sky, external optics Helios 44, March 2013, Moscow, Russia.

Prints available at Artist website (mirrors at Pixels and FineArtAmerica), RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use available at Shutterstock.com, 500px.com.

Here is another snowflake with amazing pattern in the center - Ice crown:

And here you'll find much smaller, star-shaped crystal that i've captured same day - Alcor - with interesting contrast between flower-like inner structure, with curvy lines, and straight lines of outer hexagonal part:

If you want to see more snowflakes, you can browse through all snowflake pictures.
Here you'll find snowflake photo wallpapers in numerous resolutions and screen proportions, up to Ultra HD 4K.
And here is article about snowflake macro photography.

Snowflake photo: Silverware (2667 x 2000)

Prints available at Artist website (mirrors at Pixels and FineArtAmerica), RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com, 500px.com.

This is large snowflake of fernlike dendrite type, approximately 6-7 millimeters from tip to tip. I like it's shape and light on numerous icy "leaves".

This crystal was photographed in January 2013 on large glass plate with LED back lighting, as fast series of 8 identical RAW shots. All serial photos was averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio of this image, then i start my usual processing workflow.

And this is alternate processing of same photo: with inverted luminocity and changed background colors:

Snowflake photo: Neon (2667 x 2000)

Prints available at Artist website (mirrors at Pixels and FineArtAmerica), RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com, 500px.com.

Also, i post-processed this crystal on clear black background:

This snowflake was featured in nice cosplay work by May:

I used silhouette of this snowflake for design of snowflake flash drives by USB Memory Direct:

If you want to see more snowflakes, you can browse through all snowflake pictures.
Here you'll find snowflake photo wallpapers in numerous resolutions and screen proportions, up to Ultra HD 4K.
And here is article about snowflake macro photography.

 >> snowflakes - printable versions, part II

Trying to do something with low resolution of snowflake shots. I enlarged pictures 2x using SmartEdge demo, free resampling program. It works very slow, but produces output with good looking lines and edges and preserves textures clarity. This demo version also have input image restrictions (resolution should not be bigger than 512 x 512 pixels), so i processed whole pictures part by part and then reassembled.

Then i applied one of these nice freeware canvas textures in "soft light" blending mode with small opacity. This texture masked noise and resampling artifacts, making picture more appealing (i hope) at 1:1 scale view.

1600 x 1200



2048 x 1536



2294 x 1720



2048 x 1536



4096 x 3072

If you want to see more snowflakes, you can browse through all snowflake pictures.
Here you'll find snowflake photo wallpapers in numerous resolutions and screen proportions, up to Ultra HD 4K.
And here is article about snowflake macro photography.