Flying castle

Snowflake photo: Flying castle (1600 x 1200)

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

I really like this snowflake: it have beautiful shape, relief details, and i was lucky with lighting. This is medium size snow crystal, 3 or 4 millimeters from tip to tip. I captured it during amazing snowfall, one of the best that i remember:

That day, January 16 2014, was very good for snowflake photography from early morning: i captured lots of nice specimens, but all this can't compare with snowfall, started around 16:00. Suddenly, i've saw lots of amazing crystals, falling at my glass background. I've tried to catch only best snowflakes, and as fast as i can, but that was very hard choice, which crystal photograph next: all of them were big, symmetrical and extremely beautiful! The only flaw with these crystals that they was covered by some bubbles of rime, but not too much.

After half of a hour, snow changed: snowflakes become even bigger, but more chaotic and less symmetrical. But still, i've managed to catch lots of amazing specimens. After removing bad photos, my snowflake archive from that day contains 955 RAW + Jpeg images, which took 12.3 gigabytes of disk space after packing RAWs with archiver 7-Zip (using PPMd compression method).

8 identical RAW photos, taken as short series, was averaged for dramatically better signal/noise ratio of this picture.

This snowflake in alternate colors:

Snowflake photo: Flying castle, alternate colors (1600 x 1200)

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

Flying castle also available as Ultra HD wallpaper:

Here you can see other snowflakes from that amazing snowfall: Massive gold, Silver foil, Cold metal, Iron crown / Spark, and one of these big and not very symmetrical crystals from the end of snowfall: Crystal of chaos and order. Also, lots of beautiful crystal waits, when i'll find time to process them!

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