Serenity

Snowflake photo: Serenity (1600 x 1200)

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

This is another snowflake from January 2016. It seems that this crystal have biggest central hexagon among all snowflakes that i processed so far: around 2 millimeters, or even slightly bigger! We can't classify it as hexagonal plate snowflake, though, because this crystal starts to grow tiny arms. I've watched TV series Firefly yesterday (love it so much!), and named this crystal after spaceship from the series.

The main problem with this photo was cleaning of background. When i photographed that crystal, my glass plate was almost completely covered with tiny condensed droplets: they was everywhere around crystal. On some angles of transit light from behind of glass, these droplets become visible and very detailed. I don't want to see them in processed picture, so i have no other choice than manually clean them out, one by one, from whole 12 megapixel picture. This was long and boring task, i'm assure you! :)

15 identical RAW shots, taken as fast series, was averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio of this image. Snowflake captured on glass background with LED back light, with additional lens Helios 44M-5, in Moscow, Russia.

Check out this wonderful crocheted snowflake, based on this crystal, made by Snowcatcher! You will see an excellent final result and all working stages:

Crocheted snowflake Serenity - made by Snowcatcher

I have really good catch of interesting and unusual snowflakes from January 3, 2016 (more than 7 gigabytes of RAW + Jpeg source photos in archive from just one day!). I've processed interesting snowflake of sectored plate type: Winter fortress; unusual crystal with big and empty central hexagon: Sunflower, and have many other wonderful crystals to work with.

Closeup snowflake photo: Winter fortress, small sectored plate snow crystal with complex relief surface, divided by rows to six sectors, glittering on gray-blue gradient background

Snowflake photo: Sunflower, unusual snow crystal with large, flat and empty center, relief outer rim and short arms, sparkling on pale blue 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.