Snowflake-a-Day #35
This little crystal is from one of the warm snowfalls earlier this season. It’s difficult to shoot them before they melt, with the outer features fading first. The inner details however are something to marvel at. View large!
Warm snowfalls are very difficult to photograph in, but I’m out there every chance I get; You never know when something interesting and unusual is going to appear in front of you! This plate-turned-dendrite has one of my favourite forms, providing interesting fern-like branches with strong geometry in the center. The center here also has a bit extra: a snowflake inside a snowflake.
Not exactly, but it’s a fun example of a “skeletal form” type crystal. The smaller top snowflake shape has “bones” that run up the center of the branches and connect the top plate to the bottom plate. This kind of snowflake is a unique variant of the split-plate or capped column, where the stunted growth of the secondary plate (the one that lost the battle for access to water vapour) continues to grow outward, albeit at a slower pace than its bigger half. You don’t see these structures often!
This likely means that the side containing the smaller plate was facing the direction of wind, and thereby was still able to have some access to “building blocks” for continued growth. This can be backed up by the smaller rounded trapezoidal shapes on the inside of the larger plate. These indicate inward crystal growth, showing that the plate is “filling in” from thicker edges. This only happens when the inner area of the crystal is able to still receive water vapour.
Editing these snowflakes becomes a bigger challenge as well. As these subjects are so very fleeting, from the first frame to the last frame the snowflake might have completely melted. Focus-stacking is the technique used to combine multiple frames at different focus points to get the entire snowflake crisp and sharp from tip to tip… but what happens if the subject is actively changing while you shoot? The answer is a bit of a headache.
The center of the snowflake would remain largely untouched by the melting process, but the branches are tricky as they start to melt first. I usually pass forward and back across the snowflake, hoping to get as many needed images as possible in a single pass. I might make 4-5 passes across the crystal, making sure that I haven’t missed anything, as there are always images missing from the sequence due to the hand-held approach I use… it’s the missing slices that prove problematic.
If I need to take the missing slices from a second or third pass across the crystal, it won’t line up properly with its neighbouring focus slices. The later image will have degraded further; edges would be more rounded and the tips would be shorter. Making them fit together again is a manual process that takes a fair bit of time in Photoshop. On average my snowflake images take about 4 hours to edit, but these kinds of issues usually add an hour onto that process. I think it’s worth the extra time, and I hope you agree!
Snowflakes form in very interesting and beautiful ways, and understanding where these shapes come from has always fascinated me. If you like these posts, you’ll absolutely love the 304pg hardcover book “Sky Crystals: Unraveling the Mysteries of Snowflakes”: skycrystals.ca/book/ - it’s everything a science and photography geek could hope for. :)
To marvel at more of these winter wonders, check out “The Snowflake” print, which is the culmination of over 2500 hours of work with the subject funneled into a single image: skycrystals.ca/poster/ - the perfect image to make winter a little more tolerable!
Snowflake-a-Day #35
This little crystal is from one of the warm snowfalls earlier this season. It’s difficult to shoot them before they melt, with the outer features fading first. The inner details however are something to marvel at. View large!
Warm snowfalls are very difficult to photograph in, but I’m out there every chance I get; You never know when something interesting and unusual is going to appear in front of you! This plate-turned-dendrite has one of my favourite forms, providing interesting fern-like branches with strong geometry in the center. The center here also has a bit extra: a snowflake inside a snowflake.
Not exactly, but it’s a fun example of a “skeletal form” type crystal. The smaller top snowflake shape has “bones” that run up the center of the branches and connect the top plate to the bottom plate. This kind of snowflake is a unique variant of the split-plate or capped column, where the stunted growth of the secondary plate (the one that lost the battle for access to water vapour) continues to grow outward, albeit at a slower pace than its bigger half. You don’t see these structures often!
This likely means that the side containing the smaller plate was facing the direction of wind, and thereby was still able to have some access to “building blocks” for continued growth. This can be backed up by the smaller rounded trapezoidal shapes on the inside of the larger plate. These indicate inward crystal growth, showing that the plate is “filling in” from thicker edges. This only happens when the inner area of the crystal is able to still receive water vapour.
Editing these snowflakes becomes a bigger challenge as well. As these subjects are so very fleeting, from the first frame to the last frame the snowflake might have completely melted. Focus-stacking is the technique used to combine multiple frames at different focus points to get the entire snowflake crisp and sharp from tip to tip… but what happens if the subject is actively changing while you shoot? The answer is a bit of a headache.
The center of the snowflake would remain largely untouched by the melting process, but the branches are tricky as they start to melt first. I usually pass forward and back across the snowflake, hoping to get as many needed images as possible in a single pass. I might make 4-5 passes across the crystal, making sure that I haven’t missed anything, as there are always images missing from the sequence due to the hand-held approach I use… it’s the missing slices that prove problematic.
If I need to take the missing slices from a second or third pass across the crystal, it won’t line up properly with its neighbouring focus slices. The later image will have degraded further; edges would be more rounded and the tips would be shorter. Making them fit together again is a manual process that takes a fair bit of time in Photoshop. On average my snowflake images take about 4 hours to edit, but these kinds of issues usually add an hour onto that process. I think it’s worth the extra time, and I hope you agree!
Snowflakes form in very interesting and beautiful ways, and understanding where these shapes come from has always fascinated me. If you like these posts, you’ll absolutely love the 304pg hardcover book “Sky Crystals: Unraveling the Mysteries of Snowflakes”: skycrystals.ca/book/ - it’s everything a science and photography geek could hope for. :)
To marvel at more of these winter wonders, check out “The Snowflake” print, which is the culmination of over 2500 hours of work with the subject funneled into a single image: skycrystals.ca/poster/ - the perfect image to make winter a little more tolerable!