Snowflake Macro Photography

Instructions: Click on any photo to see a larger version

This is the gear I use, more or less, to photograph snowflakes, shown here during another, indoor activity. (All Canon unless otherwise mentioned.) From top down, standing in as "body double" for the D30 (which took this photo) is an Elan II, riding a 2x Mark II teleconverter, atop a 70-200/2.8 L IS, with a 50/1.8 mark II reverse mounted on the front using two Cokin filter adapters glued together by their faceplates to serve as macro coupling ring. The flash is set to manual power and triggered through a PC cord. Maximum magnification with the D30 is about 8x. Sometimes I remove the 2x for less magnification, although I get vignetting. And sometimes I also remove the 50/1.8 and substitute weaker screw-on close-up adapters.

This was a very early effort. And things weren't cold enough; the darn flake was melting into my paper background.

Another learning attempt. I shot this twice, once with a coloured filter over the flash, and then composited them in Photoshop.

After I saw the work at www.snowcrystals.com, I was inspired to try again. I made a small support for microscope slides that also had a diffuse reflector under to bounce the flash light upwards. Things were looking up. Except it's hard to know if your flake is "dirty" like this one until you get it all set up. By then you might as well take the photo.

I won't lie; I love to play in Photoshop. I like making IMAGES and I don't care if I contort a real photo. So I eschewed the trouble of using multiple flashes and colour filters etc to get lighting effect in the camera, opting instead to synthesize them later in Photoshop. Here I simply removed the backlight. But hang on...



Whimsical asterflakes. This was an early try at processing the flake to act like glass and distort the image behind it.

A straight photo.

The depth of field I get with this setup feels like zero sometimes.

A straight photo.

Some fake colour.

More natural-looking fake colour.

Wavy Gravy Snowflake?

This flake is interesting because instead of the regular 6-fold axis of symmetry, it has a 2-fold axis of symmetry.

This was a later attempt at giving a flake the glass treatment.

The yellow hilights are synthetic.

With magnification, it's easier to understand why snowflakes can interlock and pack.

This was the result of an accident; wrong parameters in a filter. Serendipity or car wreck. You decide.

The grainy-looking stuff on the side is simply a by-product of the processing I did in Photoshop to add the yellow highlights. I thought it looked kinda neat so I left it in.

Heavy metal flake. If you look carefully, you'll see my reflection in the molten metal. ;^)

A variation on the metal theme.
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