High voltage / Gecko's paw

Snowflake photo: High voltage (1776 x 1332)

This is medium size snowflake, around 3 millimeters from tip to tip. Captured on glass surface with LED back light, with additional lens Helios 44M-5, December 2014, Moscow. 12 identical RAWs photos, taken as quick series, was averaged for better signal-to-noise ratio.

I like big, broad and clean arms of this crystal, resembling duck feet: they attract my attention instantly, when i saw this snowflake on glass. This crystal looks unusual and interesting even for naked eye.

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

And this is negative variant, created from inverted picture:

Snowflake photo: Gecko's paw (1600 x 1200)

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

Also, here is variant with bright crystal, transferred to clear black background. I'm huge fan of Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley, pioneer of snowflake photography, and his photos is my constant source of inspiration. He used sharp knife to scrape photographic emulsion from plates outside the crystal, to get beautiful black background. I use small Photoshop brush, instead of knife, to achieve the same effect, and draw by hand precise mask at contour of snow crystal. Creating this mask also require patience and significant amount of time, but can't compare with Wilson Bentley's work with backgrounds.

Snowflake photo: High voltage II (1600 x 1200)

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

And here is slightly different snowflake with broad arms: Ice crown, captured on dark woolen fabric:

Also, in this quick processed series you'll find another large snowflake with similar arms:

December 26, 2014, was amazing day for snowflake photography in Moscow: my snowflake archive from that day contains several hundreds of source photos, and took more than 8 gigabytes of disk space. I've already processed two more snowflakes: Winter technologies and Gardener's dream, and have lots of nice specimens for future work!

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.