Rigel

Snowflake photo: Rigel (1800 x 1350)

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

This is another stellar dendrite snowflake from January 2013. This snow crystal was difficult to work because it quickly melts at edges, while i captured series for averaging. Averaging photos with such serious differences leads to blurry zones (where melting occurs). So, i manually restored outer edges of snowflake using first photo from the series. 6 identical photos was averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio of this image. Background: dark grey woolen fabric, natural light from cloudy sky, external optics Helios 44M-5, Moscow, Russia.

My processing workflow includes manual drawing precise mask at contour of snowflake (to being able process crystal and background separately), and i used this mask again for variant with blurred background:

Snowflake picture: Rigel, blur variant (1365 x 1365)

Licenses for commercial use available at Shutterstock.com, 500px.com.

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

Also, this snowflake available as Ultra HD wallpaper:

This snow crystal, and Starlight are the most beautiful stellar dendrites from all my catch of January:

I also combined both snow crystals into one picture:

Snowflake photo: When winters meets 2 (3400 x 2550)

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

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