Enigma

Snowflake photo: Enigma (1200 x 900)

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

These "triangular" snowflakes are not very common: i have only few shots of them from 8 winters. In fact, these crystals are hexagons, with 3 long and 3 short sides. Sometimes i see some specimens among ice dust crystals (very small snowflakes, much lesser than 1 millimeter in size), but this crystal was relatively big: around 1.5 millimeters.

This snowflake have really weird and extraordinary "design": i can't remember anything similar to these three big slopes at edges. Central triangle with volume surface looks interesting too, as well as thin "carvings", which form the outer pattern, interleaved with slopes.

This unusual crystal was captured on large sheet of glass with LED back lighting, using additional optics Helios 44M-5 as magnifier. 11 identical RAW photos was taken as fast series, and averaged for improved signal/noise ratio of this picture. It was not easy to process, because almost all background around was covered by piles and clusters of other snowflakes, and cleaning them out was hard work.

That day, 9 January 2015, i've captured another triangular jewel - Four directions:

Snowflake image: Four directions - rare triangular snow crystal with simple pattern of straight lines and ridges inside, glittering 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.