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A couple of Christmas snowflakes

Started 4 months ago | Discussions thread
fwwidall
OP fwwidall Regular Member • Posts: 155
Re: A couple of Christmas snowflakes

RBIV wrote:

OK. I'll probably embarrass myself with this question, but as a coastal California boy who seldom sees it snow, I have to ask...

...how do you gather, mount, illuminate, focus, etc. without the snowflake melting?

After this weekend's deadly winter blast across the continent I envy you your climate

Here's an earlier version of my setup showing the basic idea.

Start with a cold temperature and some snow coming down. I find -10C is good. The snowflakes don't immediately sublimate and I can stay outside for a while without the risk of frostbite No wind helps as well as the crystals are less likely to be damaged from collisions with each other.

I collect the falling snow on a piece of glass from an old picture frame, and mount it on my upside down microscope base. I put the camera in liveview mode and adjust focus using the focus knobs on the microscope base. I have the HDMI output from the camera going to a monitor so I can see details better.

Once I'm in focus I fire a flash up through the crystal and take the image. I use the lid off a Maxwell House coffee can to get the blue colour.

Then I postprocess the image to remove any water drops and other junk from the image.

As I've said many times I much prefer photographing them to shoveling them.

If you'd like to see lots more examples please check out my snowflake album on Flickr, or a short video I uploaded The Beauty of Snowflakes - YouTube

Fred.

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