Vega

Snowflake photo: Vega (2539 x 1904)

Prints available at Artist website (mirrors at Pixels and FineArtAmerica), RedBubble.com, Society6.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com, Marketplace.500px.com.

This snowflake was captured in March 25, 2013, along with many other excellent crystals - and without any traces of melting! Such good for snowflake photography, cold weather is not typical for late March in Moscow.

This snow crystal, though looks like "traditional" snowflake, is quite unusual: it is big (around 6 millimeters from tip to tip), but have very simple shape for such large size. And if you look closely at two upper arms, you can notice that they are slightly differs from four others; examining the center of this crystal in full resolution tell us that this crystal is typical example of split plate snowflake. You can find great description of this type in Kenneth Libbrecht's snowflake classification.

For this picture, i've captured 8 identical RAW photos in short series, and averaged them to boost signal-to-noise ratio. Background: dark woolen fabric, natural light (grey cloudy sky), external optics Helios 44M-5.

Here is another example of split plate snowflake, which i captured on glass surface with LED back light: Crystal of chaos and order:

Here is variant with blur background:

Snowflake photo: Vega II (1600 x 1600)

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

I used this variant as square tile in collage Under the grey sky with three other snowflakes (Rigel, Leaves of ice and Alioth):

Also, this snowflake available as Ultra HD wallpaper:

And here is another large crystal that i've photographed same day - The beauty of imperfection - with one reduced arm, but gorgeous pattern in the center:

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