From ten thousand feet above the Earth, a snowflake begins its fall. Its journey starts when ice forms around a nucleus of dust and is blown by the winds through clouds where the crystals blossom into tiny ice stars. Because it weighs next to nothing, a snow crystal may take hours to fall--finally landing where Caltech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht can use microphotography to record the tiny, intricate, frozen artistry of the snowflake.

«In a snowflake, just an ordinary snowflake, we can find a fascinating tale of the spontaneous emergence of pattern and form. From shapeless water vapor, complex structures emerge in an airborne symphony of meteorological morphogenesis. Snowflakes are the product of a rich synthesis of physics, mathematics, and chemistry -- and they're fun to catch on your tongue.»

-- Kenneth Libbrecht and Rachel Wing. "Snowflake: Winter's Frozen Artistry"

Besides of very interesting content, i was impressed by quality of snowflake photos in the book. Kenneth Libbrecht's snowflake photography is real inspiration for me.

In new revision of the book (2015), authors also introduced other snowflake photographers (including my mom and myself) with examples of their work, showing different approaches to snow crystal macro photography. We both very proud of it!

Kenneth and Rachel's book can be ordered at Amazon.com.
More books available on Kenneth's famous website SnowCrystals.com.

Also, don't miss excellent snowflake book by Don Komarechka - Sky Crystals: Unraveling the Mysteries of Snowflakes:

Snowflake collage: Under the grey sky. Full size: 3661 x 3661 pixels

For this collage i used special variants of four snowflake photos. When processing each snowflake, i draw by hand precise mask, which separates crystal from background (i need it for processing object and background with different sharpening and noise removing settings). Drawing these mask is time consuming work, and requires lots of patience; but automatic methods of edge selection, which i've tried, do not provide enough quality. Now masks was used to blur background around snowflakes.

I'm not sure that these variants are good, though, because original background is visible through transparent crystals. You can see original snowflake photos: Rigel, Leaves of ice, Alioth and Vega on unchanged background.

Dark grey woolen fabric looks quite strange on high magnification, and i cannot say that wool fibers looks beautiful. On the other hand, these thin and rigid fibers are works really well for shooting process: they effectively trap snowflake and prevent wind to blow it away; also, snowflake usually hangs in the air above wool fabric, touching fibers only at few points. This slows down melting, which is very important in warm days, when temperature is too close to freezing point.

You can see visual difference in size of crystals in this collage, and it is real: all four snowflakes was captured at same distance from the lens and with fixed magnification, and i do not re-scaled photos on post-processing stage.

Prints available at: Artist website, RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com.

This is bigger variant of collage, twice wide and tall:

Snowflake collage: Under the grey sky (2x). Full size: 7600 x 7600 pixels

Prints available at: Artist website, RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com.

And here you'll find other collages with numerous snowflakes:

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.

This is a set of 4 brushes, created from real snowflake photos:

Snowflake_brushes1.zip

Just load unpacked file snowflake_brushes1.abr from brush panel, and they will append to list of current brushes. In case if this file is not compatible with some Photoshop versions, it can be easily re-created from files in folder PNG\ with Photoshop command Edit -> Define brush preset.

After applying brush properties: Shape dynamics -> size and angle jitter, Scattering - Scatter and Other dynamics -> opacity jitter, they will produce results like this:

...and they can be useful for creating seamless patterns and backgrounds in few minutes:

This brush set is free for non-commercial use (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license).

I've created a pack of 6 Christmas cards with real snowflake photos and snow decorations, using these brushes:

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.

Beautiful transparent snowflake The core now available as Ultra HD wallpaper:

Wallpaper available in screen proportions 4:3, 5:4, 16:10 and 16:9, resolutions from 800 x 600 pixels (SVGA) to 3840 x 2160 (Ultra HD 4K).

Unusual snowflake Alioth now available as Ultra HD wallpaper:

This is reworked version of wallpaper i've already made. Now it have slightly better colors, contrast and vignetting, and no chromatic aberrations.

Wallpaper available in screen proportions 4:3, 5:4, 16:10 and 16:9, resolutions from 800x600 pixels (SVGA) to 3840x2160 (Ultra HD 4K).

1524 * 1016

I borrowed this specimen from school's biology class. This is tropical butterfly Caligo oileus (Brown Owl butterfly, or Oileus Giant Owl). This fragment is the part of white rim around big "eye" at rear side of the wings.

Gear: my usual "snowflake" macro setup (i described it in article about snowflake macro photography). Daylight from top, no diffusors, no reflectors. Averaged 64 RAWs, no focus stacking.

Fragment in original resolution:

Sketch: Moscow steampunk (4000 x 3000)

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

I've tried nice program PhotoSketcher and really like it! It is free, have lots of painting modes and settings, and produces very interesting results. I definitely will use it more.

From this HDR photo i created in PhotoSketcher 5 variants with different level of details (different number of passes and minimal brush size). Then, i combined them in Photoshop with masks, and applied canvas texture from this great set: free canvas textures.