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:

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.

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.

Valentine's day snowflake

I already posted this amazing hexagonal plate crystal: Frozen hearts almost a year ago, and this is post-processed version, with slightly better contrast and colors:

Snowflake photo: Frozen hearts (1200 x 900)

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

This variant have bigger cropping, and maybe it will be better for design:

Snowflake photo: Frozen hearts, big cropping (3200 x 2400)

Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com.

This heart-like pattern inside of snowflake really rare thing: i have seen it only twice in all of my photos, taken during 8 winters. In January 2016, i was lucky to take photo of another snowflake with six tiny hearts, connected to corners of hexagonal center:

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.

Eye of the night

This is re-processing of old moon photo: brighter, with slightly better resolution and lower noise. In fact, this is not real photo, but photo manipulation:

Moon picture: Eye of the night (1681 x 1261)

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

Moon itself was captured with this strange construction as 48 identical RAW photos. The only difference between them is small shift of moon in every photo: zoom level is high enough to make moon movement easily noticeable even at short exposures. Long exposures is not applicable because of motion blur.

After capturing moon series, i captured surrounding clouds with much lesser zoom, also as short series. Moon and cloud stacks was aligned and averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio, processed separately, and blended together at final stage. I applied pseudo-HDR processing to enhance craters, ridges and other details of moon surface. Also, i painted "reflect" at dark side of the moon with brush.

Fernlike dendrites on black

This is experiment with post-processing previously released snowflake photos (two large fernlike dendrite crystals: Silverware and Majestic crystal) with completely different look and feel.

New processing includes separating brigther-than-background and darker-than-background snowflake details at two separate layers (using difference blending mode) as bright contours at dark background. Then, i changed color of one layer, blended two contours together with manually painted mask, and transferred result from dark and noisy to clear black background:

Snowflake photo: Neon, black variant (2000 x 2000)

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

Snowflake photo: Majestic crystal, black variant (2400 x 2400)

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

Original photos:

I've processed same way two other snowflakes, smaller and more simple crystals: Neon snowflakes.

Difference blending is nice method to get interesting graphics effect. I've used it also to get rich colors from two variants of same snowflake: Mirror's edge:

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.