Crystal Slice
I thought I’d take a moment today to show what a “slice” of one of my snowflakes looks like, with just a few basic adjustments done in Lightroom to bring this to you. View Large!
Snowflakes are complex little crystals, and the best way to showcase this complexity is to get light to reflect off the surface of the snowflake. If the crystal was parallel to the focal plane in the camera to get most of it in focus, such lighting would be impossible as the light would need to originate from inside the camera lens itself to bounce back in the right direction for “surface glare”. Instead, the snowflake needs to be photographed on an angle.
There is about a five degree window where the surface reflection really shines and makes the snowflake sparkle, and I rotate the camera around the snowflake in order to get this angle exactly as needed. A few test shots and I usually find it, and then I continuously shoot hundreds of images of the same snowflake at all different “slices” of focus.
If the snowflake is on an angle like this, it reveals how truly shallow the depth of field is – fractions of a millimeter most of the time. An average of 40 frames are required to get focus from tip to tip, though the most I’ve done for a snowflake is 70. Photoshop does a decent job of aligning the images, but the geometry will never be perfectly connected due to shifts in perspective from one image to the next. The process of combining the images together automatically takes minutes, but applying all of the corrections takes hours.
For a larger snowflake like this one, I would probably spend 5-6 hours working on it; I may never edit this one in its entirety, however. One of the left branches is significantly broken just outside of the frame, so this one is lower on my priority list. I have well over 700 unedited snowflakes and I know I’ll never get to them all – so here’s a glimpse at some of the magic that remains locked away. Every new snowfall I shoot far more snowflakes than I can edit, and choose the best ones to work on for this series. For other projects if I need a special type of snowflake or to showcase a unique feature, I dig through my archives and bump a matching crystal higher in the list of ones to edit.
If you’re curious about the process that I go through with my snowflakes, in the field all the way through the post-processing workflow, I’ve got just the thing: www.skycrystals.ca/book/ - roughly a third of the 304pg hardcover book is dedicated to the photographic process that results in images like this. You’ll also find equal time spent discussing the science of snow and how these gems are created – it’s a book perfect for any naturalist or photographer!
Crystal Slice
I thought I’d take a moment today to show what a “slice” of one of my snowflakes looks like, with just a few basic adjustments done in Lightroom to bring this to you. View Large!
Snowflakes are complex little crystals, and the best way to showcase this complexity is to get light to reflect off the surface of the snowflake. If the crystal was parallel to the focal plane in the camera to get most of it in focus, such lighting would be impossible as the light would need to originate from inside the camera lens itself to bounce back in the right direction for “surface glare”. Instead, the snowflake needs to be photographed on an angle.
There is about a five degree window where the surface reflection really shines and makes the snowflake sparkle, and I rotate the camera around the snowflake in order to get this angle exactly as needed. A few test shots and I usually find it, and then I continuously shoot hundreds of images of the same snowflake at all different “slices” of focus.
If the snowflake is on an angle like this, it reveals how truly shallow the depth of field is – fractions of a millimeter most of the time. An average of 40 frames are required to get focus from tip to tip, though the most I’ve done for a snowflake is 70. Photoshop does a decent job of aligning the images, but the geometry will never be perfectly connected due to shifts in perspective from one image to the next. The process of combining the images together automatically takes minutes, but applying all of the corrections takes hours.
For a larger snowflake like this one, I would probably spend 5-6 hours working on it; I may never edit this one in its entirety, however. One of the left branches is significantly broken just outside of the frame, so this one is lower on my priority list. I have well over 700 unedited snowflakes and I know I’ll never get to them all – so here’s a glimpse at some of the magic that remains locked away. Every new snowfall I shoot far more snowflakes than I can edit, and choose the best ones to work on for this series. For other projects if I need a special type of snowflake or to showcase a unique feature, I dig through my archives and bump a matching crystal higher in the list of ones to edit.
If you’re curious about the process that I go through with my snowflakes, in the field all the way through the post-processing workflow, I’ve got just the thing: www.skycrystals.ca/book/ - roughly a third of the 304pg hardcover book is dedicated to the photographic process that results in images like this. You’ll also find equal time spent discussing the science of snow and how these gems are created – it’s a book perfect for any naturalist or photographer!