Massive gold

Snowflake photo: Massive gold (1400 x 1050)

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

New snowflake photo from 16th January, 2014. That day in Moscow was wonderful snowfall, and i've captured almost 20 gigabytes of RAW + Jpeg source photos - i'll process more nice crystals soon. I used simple multi-color lighting (fragment of plastic bag with white/orange pattern putted on LED flashlight).

I like this crystal's relief surface, and especially quite complex and interesting inner pattern. Did you notice six elements, which are located in the middle, between arms, and pointed toward center? They remind me interleaved array of 3 torches and 3 bigger street lamps.

This snowflake was captured on large sheet of glass with light from behind, using Canon Powershot A650is and additional lens Helios 44, mounted in front of built-in camera's optics. 8 identical RAW photos, taken as fast series, was averaged to boost SNR of this picture.

If you are curious, how this snowflake looks without post-processing, here is picture for compare: single in-camera JPEG vs post-processed stack of 8 RAWs:

And this is version in cold silver tones:

Snowflake photo: Massive silver (1400 x 1050)

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

This snowflake also available as full HD desktop wallpaper:

I've used colder variant of this crystal to create square picture in a frame on pastel background, along with three other snowflakes:

This is collage, created from two color variants of this snowflake, warm and cold:

Music album 1975 Triptych by M-Opus, Irish progressive rock band, featuring this snowflake in booklet:

And here is another snowflake from same wonderful snowfall, Flying castle:

If you want to see more snowflakes, you can browse through all snowflake pictures.
And here is article about snowflake macro photography.