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:
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)