Snowflake photo: Winter fortress (1200 x 900)

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

This is my first processed snowflake from this winter: small sectored plate crystal, slightly bigger than 1 millimeter. I already captured lots of new snow crystals, just need some time for processing!

Sectored plate snowflakes really amazing type: they have simple shape, but rich surface, full of relief details. I like that "rows", which divide plate to six sectors, and central pattern, resembling dark flower.

This crystal is good illustration, why i love small snowflakes so much: often they look more unusual than bigger crystals, and have their own beauty in simplicity.

14 identical RAW photos, taken as quick series, was averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio of this picture. Snowflake captured on glass surface with LED back light, with additional lens Helios 44M-5, January 2016, in Moscow, Russia.

Second version with slightly different colors:

Snowflake photo: Winter fortress alternate (1200 x 900)

Snowfalls of January 3, 2016 brings us some very interesting and unusual crystals. My total catch of that day in snowflake archive tooks more than 7 gigabytes of RAW + Jpeg source photos. I've already processed two other snowflakes: Serenity and Sunflower, and have many other specimens to 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.

I've already posted two GIF animations (with snowflake melting and reversed sublimation, which looks like "grow"), and here is 3 more animations of snowflakes, melting on glass.

This January starts really good for snowflake photography in Moscow: it is cold and snowy almost every day. I've already captured lots of new interesting crystals, and will process them soon!

However, January 14 was a little warm for good shooting: there was snowfalls, and many nice crystals, but my glass plate simply can't cool enough: even after 30 minutes of cooling outside, snowflakes slowly melts on it. So, instead of shooting sequences of identical shots for averaging, i captured sequences of melting stages. For shooting these series fast enough, i've temporary disabled RAW writing, and captured only JPEGs.

Here is three GIF animations: first one assembled from 20 sequental photos (~6 mb), second one - from 29 photos (~7,5 mb), and third - from 32 photos (~8 mb):

It is interesting to see how some snowflake features transforms into air bubbles, and remains inside waterdrop.

Here you'll find all snowflake GIF animations, that i've assembled from series of still photos.

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.

I'm happy to announce that my snowflake photo Almost triangle was chosen as cover for music disk "Asylum Benefits EP" by Laurent Memmi, a French drone / ambient music producer:

And here is two albums in different genres, which also features my snowflake photos on covers - 1975 Triptych by M-Opus, Irish progressive rock band, and Unicum by Draugh, music composer from Chile:

Snowflake picture: Christmas card 6 (2370 x 1580)

I'm sorry for terrible text: i've hand written it on paper and scanned, and my hand-writing is even worse than collage making. Snow decorations created with my snowflake brushes for Adobe Photoshop. Hope that i'll create something better for next Christmas!

ZIP archive with all 6 cards on Google Drive.

Prints available at RedBubble.com: card 1, card 2, card 3, card 4, card 5, card 6.

Snowflake picture: Christmas card 1 (2992 x 1995)


Snowflake picture: Christmas card 2 (2984 x 1989)


Snowflake picture: Christmas card 3 (2904 x 1936)


Snowflake picture: Christmas card 4 (2952 x 1968)


Snowflake picture: Christmas card 5 (2936 x 1957)

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.

I hardly imagine how much time and effort it takes to create this ultra high resolution poster by Don Komarechka!

Canadian professional photographer Don Komarechka (Website, Google+, Facebook, Flickr) individually captured and processed all those 400+ snow crystals using focus stacking technique. Sometimes i use focus stacking, too, and i can say that this technique requires patience, accuracy and lots of time and effort.

This poster can be ordered at Don's website:

SkyCrystals.ca/product/poster

Interesting fact: all snowflakes you see here presented in their real scale, relative to each other. This was not easy to achieve, said Don. For each snowflake in this poster Don carefully adjusts lighting and shoots lots of source photos with different focus, required for later processing.

Good light means a lot in snowflake macro photography, especially for snow crystals that shows wonderful rainbow-like thin film optical interference effect. This effect can be seen only on snowflakes, which contains air cavities in their body, and interleaved layers of ice and air very thin. And even if snowflake can produce these colors, they need proper light to be seen. Don Komarechka a real magician, who able to make these snowflakes to show the best they can offer:

Don captures and processes wide range of snow crystals, showing their huge diversity: from tiny and very unusual snowflake types...

...to big, "traditional", but unique and extremely beautiful stellar dendrite crystals:

I'm big fan of Don Komarechka's snowflake photography, and always wait for his new Snowflake-a-Day project. During whole winter, Don processes and posts one snowflake photo each day, including weekends and holidays. Because processing of every single photo requires several hours of careful and accurate work, this project is really hard task!

This winter, Don already started his project. On very first photo from this winter, you see rare and complex snowflake formation: two rosettes of bullet crystals with branched caps:

If you would like, you can follow Don Komarechka in social networks:

Google+, Facebook, Flickr

and enjoy his new snowflake photos every day!

Also, i recommend to see another excellent work by Don Komarechka - illustrated hardcover book about his way of snowflake photography, physics of ice crystals formation and many other interesting topics:

(photographs in this post and the book cover (c) Don Komarechka, posted using embed codes from his Flickr photostream)

Just trying various post-processing techniques of snowflake macro photos. Here is four snowflakes (Massive silver, Beneath a steel sky, Cryogenia and Wheel of time) in square frames on light pastel background:

Snowflake picture: Massive silver (2952 x 2952)


Snowflake picture: Beneath a steel sky (1856 x 1856)

Snowflake picture: Cryogenia (2504 x 2504)


Snowflake picture: Wheel of time (2560 x 2560)

Prints available at Artist website: crystal 1, crystal 2, crystal 3, crystal 4;
and RedBubble.com: crystal 1, crystal 2, crystal 3, crystal 4.

These snowflake pictures based on high resolution collage (120 megapixels):

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.

Snowflake photo: Majestic crystal (3800 x 2850)

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

This is very big snowflake, approximately 8 millimeters from tip to tip. It is bigger than these two large snowflakes of same type: Silverware / Neon and Cloud number nine:

This is fernlike dendrite snow crystal. This type can be seen often, and usually these crystals bigger than snowflakes of other types. I have seen crystals slightly bigger than 1 centimeter from tip to tip! These snowflakes can be seen by naked eye in full details, especially on contrast dark backdrop. These snowflakes reminds stellar dendrites, but have more complex and "random" structure: they have more "side branches" and "leaves", and they grows with not too strict symmetry.

Also, these crystals are fragile: their branches are big, but central hexagon is small, compared to other snow crystals. Often they can be seen with lost arms, and it seems that they can broke in air, before they fall, when they grow big enough.

If you ever seen one fernlike dendrite crystal, you have seen them all: their "general design" is the same for every snowflake of this type, though they are all different in details.

8 identical shots was averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio of this image. Crystal captured on glass surface with LED back light, using Canon Powershot A650is with additional lens Helios 44M-5, in January 2013, Moscow.

This photo was chosen as cover for magazine Makrofoto - ausgabe 2:

Also, i processed this crystal on pure black background:

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.