Laurent Memmi - "Asylum Benefits EP"

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

This genre of ambient music is one of my favorites, and i like this music disk by Laurent Memmi very much. Excellent work!

And here is album in different genre: 1975 Triptych by M-Opus, Irish progressive rock band, featuring my snowflake photos on cover and in booklet:

Christmas card pack (6 cards)

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.

Don Komarechka. "The Snowflake" - ultra high resolution snowflake poster

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)

Pastel colored crystals

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.

Majestic crystal

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.

Snowflake wallpaper: Cloud number nine

Winter is coming, as House Stark motto says, and i've created ultra HD wallpaper from picture of very big fernlike dendrite snowflake "Cloud number nine":

This monstrous crystal available in screen proportions 4:3, 5:4, 16:10 and 16:9, resolutions from 800x600 pixels (SVGA) to 5120x2880 (Ultra HD 5K).

Article about snowflake macro photography reached 1 million views

This milestone means a lot for me. All blog pages and posts (including that article) reached only 1.5 million views by now. Currently, i work on third major update of snowflake article (russian update already done, translation to English in progress). In a few days, article will be bigger, more accurate, and, i hope, my terrible English will be slightly more readable, thanks to Google translate (it helps me often).

Kenneth Libbrecht and Rachel Wing. "Snowflake: Winter's Frozen Artistry"

From ten thousand feet above the Earth, a snowflake begins its fall. Its journey starts when ice forms around a nucleus of dust and is blown by the winds through clouds where the crystals blossom into tiny ice stars. Because it weighs next to nothing, a snow crystal may take hours to fall--finally landing where Caltech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht can use microphotography to record the tiny, intricate, frozen artistry of the snowflake.

«In a snowflake, just an ordinary snowflake, we can find a fascinating tale of the spontaneous emergence of pattern and form. From shapeless water vapor, complex structures emerge in an airborne symphony of meteorological morphogenesis. Snowflakes are the product of a rich synthesis of physics, mathematics, and chemistry -- and they're fun to catch on your tongue.»

-- Kenneth Libbrecht and Rachel Wing. "Snowflake: Winter's Frozen Artistry"

Besides of very interesting content, i was impressed by quality of snowflake photos in the book. Kenneth Libbrecht's snowflake photography is real inspiration for me.

In new revision of the book (2015), authors also introduced other snowflake photographers (including my mom and myself) with examples of their work, showing different approaches to snow crystal macro photography. We both very proud of it!

Kenneth and Rachel's book can be ordered at Amazon.com.
More books available on Kenneth's famous website SnowCrystals.com.

Also, don't miss excellent snowflake book by Don Komarechka - Sky Crystals: Unraveling the Mysteries of Snowflakes:

Under the grey sky

Snowflake collage: Under the grey sky. Full size: 3661 x 3661 pixels

For this collage i used special variants of four snowflake photos. When processing each snowflake, i draw by hand precise mask, which separates crystal from background (i need it for processing object and background with different sharpening and noise removing settings). Drawing these mask is time consuming work, and requires lots of patience; but automatic methods of edge selection, which i've tried, do not provide enough quality. Now masks was used to blur background around snowflakes.

I'm not sure that these variants are good, though, because original background is visible through transparent crystals. You can see original snowflake photos: Rigel, Leaves of ice, Alioth and Vega on unchanged background.

Dark grey woolen fabric looks quite strange on high magnification, and i cannot say that wool fibers looks beautiful. On the other hand, these thin and rigid fibers are works really well for shooting process: they effectively trap snowflake and prevent wind to blow it away; also, snowflake usually hangs in the air above wool fabric, touching fibers only at few points. This slows down melting, which is very important in warm days, when temperature is too close to freezing point.

You can see visual difference in size of crystals in this collage, and it is real: all four snowflakes was captured at same distance from the lens and with fixed magnification, and i do not re-scaled photos on post-processing stage.

Prints available at: Artist website, RedBubble.com.

This is bigger variant of collage, twice wide and tall:

Snowflake collage: Under the grey sky (2x). Full size: 7600 x 7600 pixels

Prints available at: Artist website, RedBubble.com.

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 brushes for Adobe Photoshop

This is a set of 4 brushes, created from real snowflake photos:

Snowflake_brushes1.zip

Just load unpacked file snowflake_brushes1.abr from brush panel, and they will append to list of current brushes. In case if this file is not compatible with some Photoshop versions, it can be easily re-created from files in folder PNG\ with Photoshop command Edit -> Define brush preset.

After applying brush properties: Shape dynamics -> size and angle jitter, Scattering - Scatter and Other dynamics -> opacity jitter, they will produce results like this:

...and they can be useful for creating seamless patterns and backgrounds in few minutes:

This brush set is free for non-commercial use (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license).

I've created a pack of 6 Christmas cards with real snowflake photos and snow decorations, using these brushes:

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.

New snowflake wallpaper: the core

Beautiful transparent snowflake The core now available as Ultra HD wallpaper:

Wallpaper available in screen proportions 4:3, 5:4, 16:10 and 16:9, resolutions from 800 x 600 pixels (SVGA) to 3840 x 2160 (Ultra HD 4K).

Reworked snowflake wallpaper: Alioth

Unusual snowflake Alioth now available as Ultra HD wallpaper:

This is reworked version of wallpaper i've already made. Now it have slightly better colors, contrast and vignetting, and no chromatic aberrations.

Wallpaper available in screen proportions 4:3, 5:4, 16:10 and 16:9, resolutions from 800x600 pixels (SVGA) to 3840x2160 (Ultra HD 4K).

Butterfly wing scales

1524 * 1016

I borrowed this specimen from school's biology class. This is tropical butterfly Caligo oileus (Brown Owl butterfly, or Oileus Giant Owl). This fragment is the part of white rim around big "eye" at rear side of the wings.

Gear: my usual "snowflake" macro setup (i described it in article about snowflake macro photography). Daylight from top, no diffusors, no reflectors. Averaged 64 RAWs, no focus stacking.

Fragment in original resolution:

Moscow steampunk (sketch)

Sketch: Moscow steampunk (4000 x 3000)

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

I've tried nice program PhotoSketcher and really like it! It is free, have lots of painting modes and settings, and produces very interesting results. I definitely will use it more.

From this HDR photo i created in PhotoSketcher 5 variants with different level of details (different number of passes and minimal brush size). Then, i combined them in Photoshop with masks, and applied canvas texture from this great set: free canvas textures.

New snowflake wallpaper: starlight

Stellar dendrite crystal Starlight now available as Ultra HD wallpaper:

This is one of my favorite snowflake photos. I processed this crystal in 2013, but then i made a mistake and was not saved uncropped version. This prevents me to make wallpaper version, until i re-processed that photo.

Wallpaper available in screen proportions 4:3, 5:4, 16:10 and 16:9, resolutions from 800x600 pixels (SVGA) to 3840x2160 (Ultra HD 4K).

New snowflake wallpaper: leaves of ice

Big and beautiful fernlike dendrite snowflake Leaves of ice now available as Ultra HD wallpaper:

Wallpaper available in screen proportions 4:3, 5:4, 16:10 and 16:9, resolutions from 800 x 600 pixels (SVGA) to 3840 x 2160 (Ultra HD 4K).

Big Dipper in the big city

3024 * 2016

This is fragment of old photo, slightly postprocessed. I created a mask for stars (using levels on monochrome copy of picture) and added some glow to stars with it.

Stars photography in cities like Moscow, with strong light pollution, really painful task. For this picture, i aligned and averaged stack of 10 long exposure shots (15 seconds each), taken on very edge of the city at clean and starry night.

Vectorized snowflakes

I came across wonderful online vectorizing service: vectormagic.com and very impressed by results it creates. These vector images reminds me great old video game Another World. Of course, automatic raster-to-vector transformation simplifies snowflake structure and reduces number of colors, but still, it looks really nice, at my taste.

These snowflake vector files (EPS and SVG formats) and pre-rendered PNGs with anti-aliased edges are free for non-commercial use (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license):

EPS file, SVG file, Pre-rendered PNG (8192 x 8192)



EPS file, SVG file, Pre-rendered PNG (8192 x 8192)

Here you'll find simplified vector versions of these two crystals, also in EPS / SVG formats and with high resolution rasterized PNGs.

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.

Pollen factory at work

Snowflake photo: Vegetable marrow pollen grains (800 x 800)

Stamen of vegetable marrow with pollen grains. These grains are slightly smaller than pollen of common hollyhock, and have similar shape (sphere with small spikes), but on these grains we can see also bigger spikes. For comparison, here you'll find an electronic microscopy image of marrow pollen grain:

sciencephoto.com/media/33205/view

Gear: my usual "snowflake" macro setup (i described it in article about snowflake macro photography). Daylight from left side, no diffusor, no reflector. Averaged stack of 64 identical shots.

Here is my first photo in this series: very big pollen grains of Alcea Rosea, separated on black glass:

Stamen of Field Scabious (Knautia Arvensis) with pollen

Field Scabious pollen grains (2048 x 1536)

This is macro photo of single stamen inside a flower field scabious, or Knautia Arvensis with grains of pollen. This plant is common around Moscow and in the parks of the city (we call these flowers "короставник"). Stamens of this flower produce so small pollen grains that they are beyond capabilities of my current optics: on this picture, we cannot see exact shape of grains. But pink color of pollen is real, it is not cast by flower petals, which you see at background: when i transferred this pollen at black glass, grains still looks pink on camera screen.

Prints available at Artist website, RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com, 500px.com.

Pollen grains of Field Scabious - full scale

I've found a page with images of Knautia Arvensis pollen grains, obtained by scanning electron microscope, so you can see their exact shape.

For this image, i've used my trusty "snowflake" macro setup (i described it in article about snowflake macro photography). Daylight comes from left side, and reflected from right side with aluminium foil.

I used focus stacking and averaging techniques: 12 groups of photos with different focus was taken, each group contained 10 identical shots for averaging. After assembling object, i've prepared background (averaged all 120 source RAW photos - for better smoothness of color gradients with no visible traces of noise) and combined object and background with manually painted mask.

Here is next photo - stamen of vegetable marrow with big pollen grains: