Hex appeal

This winter in Moscow still too warm for good snowflake shooting, and i continue to dig archives. This is simple hexagonal plate, around 1.5 mm. 11 serial shots averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio. Background: dark woolen fabric, natural light (gray clouded sky), external optics Helios 44M-5, march 2013, Moscow. Looks better in original resolution: 1200 * 900 pixels.

More snowflakes in album snowflakes and snow crystals.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.

Don Komarechka. "Sky Crystals: Unraveling the Mysteries of Snowflakes" - snowflake photography book

This book written by my friend from Canada, professional photographer Don Komarechka (Website, Google+, Flickr). This excellent 9x9" size hardcover book, containing 304 pages, along with fantastic snowflake photography, will detail the science, photography techniques and even delve into why we find snowflakes beautiful.

"The book contains all of my snowflake images, and will detail every photographic and editing technique used in their creation – and I encourage you to try it for yourself! The book also contains all of the science and physics of snowflakes that I can share without personally having a degree in molecular dynamics. I’ll keep the explanations easy to understand and graphic, but the science is fascinating and there are still many unanswered questions." -- Don Komarechka.

Don's snowflake photography truly amazing, much better than my efforts. He kindly spent a whole page describing my own snowflake photography approach.

The book can be ordered at Amazon.com and at Don's website:

skycrystals.ca

Book cover



Don checked quality of print process at all stages.



Two examples of Don's snowflake photography:

(photographs in this post and the book cover (c) Don Komarechka, posted with his permission)

Snowflakes - printable versions, part II

 >> snowflakes - printable versions, part I

Trying to do something with low resolution of snowflake shots. I enlarged pictures 2x using SmartEdge demo, free resampling program. It works very slow, but produces output with good looking lines and edges and preserves textures clarity. This demo version also have input image restrictions (resolution should not be bigger than 512x512 pixels), so i processed whole pictures part by part and then reassemled.

Then i applied one of these nice freeware canvas textures in "soft light" blending mode with small opacity. This texture masked noise and resampling artifacts, making picture more appealing (i hope) at 1:1 scale view.

2500 * 1876


2118 * 1588


1600 * 1200

All snowflakes in album snowflakes and snow crystals, print versions here: snowflakes for print.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.

Relief

Small snowflake, around 2 millimeters in diameter (companion crystal proportionally smaller). 8 shots averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio. Glass background with backlight, additional lens Helios 44M-5, december 2012, Moscow. Better viewed in original resolution: 1200 * 900 pixels.

More snowflakes in album snowflakes and snow crystals.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.

New design of Tumblr page

New beautiful design of page chaoticmind75.tumblr.com is made entirely by Lucy Hartman. I recommend to visit her blogs:

The-grinch-who-stole-vintage
Glam-ifornia

Thank you very much, Lucy!

Planetary system

Group of small snowflakes, 1-2 millimeters. 8 shots averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio. Glass background with backlight, additional lens Helios 44M-5, january 2013, Moscow. Better viewed in original resolution: 2256 * 1692 pixels.

More snowflakes in album snowflakes and snow crystals.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.