Forget-me-not

Snowflake photo: Forget-me-not (1200 x 900)

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

This snowflake definitely one of most beautiful specimens from all my catch of January 2015 (and one of my personal favorites). This is very small snow crystal, slightly bigger than 1 millimeter, but it contains unusually complex and dense inner pattern for such tiny size. It reminds me small flower Forget-me-not. In Russia, we call this flower незабудка (niezabudka), which means the same: forget me not.

Processing of this jewel was quite easy. I captured it at large sheet of glass, using LED back lighting and additional lens Helios 44M-5, attached in front of my camera for bigger magnification. 8 identical RAW photos was averaged for much lower noise and better details.

You might also like this tiny snowflake with simple shape, but complex pattern: Flower within a flower. That snowflake was also captured in January, three weeks before:

Here you'll find realistic vector version of this snowflake and simplified version in two colors (in EPS / SVG formats and high resolution rasterized PNGs). Of course, vectorization process simplifies snowflake details and reduces number of colors, but still, i like how it turns out, and ability to stretch it to any size without further loss of details is really great!

Also, this snowflake available as ultra HD wallpaper:

If you want to see more snowflakes, you can browse through all snowflake pictures.
And here is article about snowflake macro photography.