Frozen hearts

Snowflake photo: Frozen hearts (1024 x 768)

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

Maybe this is "8 March snowflake" or "Valentine's day snowflake", but actually it was captured in January 2015. This tiny hexagonal plate crystal, lesser than 1 millimeter in size, shows us unusual pattern of six elements with heart shape, pointing at corners of hexagon. This is first case when i saw something resembling heart inside of snow crystal.

Unfortunately, i photographed this crystal not as good as it deserves: from 8 serial shots, which i've took for averaging process, 5 photos have poor lighting, and i had only three good source shots to work with. So, i've tried my best to remove noise as possible while preserving all significant snowflake details.

I processed this crystal in warm pink colors for birthday of my girl Lucy:

Later, i've enchanced this snowflake photo for slightly better contrast and colors.

And this is alternate color version:

Snowflake photo: Frozen hearts, alternate colors (1024 x 768)

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

Also, one year after i was lucky to take photo of another snow crystal with six tiny hearts, connected to corners of central hexagon. This snowflake much bigger than first specimen:

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.