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Snow crystals

One of nature's smallest wonders

Taking photographs of snow crystals is probably the hardest thing I have done in photography. Cold conditions are barely a challenge compared to getting the correct lighting & focus, let alone the wait for some of the most pristine crystals. Most people think all snow crystals look like the ones in this gallery but they do not; instead these are relatively rare. Most snow falls as aggregates of more than one crystal and many fall with broken branches and/or rime (see below).

Snowflake photos in the news

A local television station, Denver's Channel 7 interviewed Greg for a gallery exhibit that included the snowflakes shown here. A brief clip of the interview showed how he photographed individual snowflakes (13 MB download).

Snowflake poster for sale

This poster is 13 inches wide by 19 inches tall (33 x 48.25 cm). Each snowflake image is shown on the left or right margin in its true size along with a scale one centimeter in length with millimeter divisions. See detailed sample area 1 and sample area 2.

 for $8.00 (USD).

To get magnification of four to eight times, I combine multiple camera lenses but you can also adapt a camera to a microscope. I prefer to use my camera lenses because microscopes are even more expensive than camera gear.

Rime: snow collecting tiny droplets

As mentioned above, often snow will fall through a layer of cloud that is composed of microscopic subcooled water droplets. Often those droplets, which fall imperceptably slow, are collected by the faster-falling snow crystals. Upon impact, those droplets immediately freeze and the accumulation of these frozen droplets is termed rime. While the rime itself is interesting, it is usually more three-dimensional (spherical) than the snow crystals and this makes perfect focus nearly impossible. So most of the rime seen in these photos appears like dark specks obscuring the view of the linear snowflake edges. To the naked eye, the rime appears as white and more opaque than the snow crystal itself.

Under relatively infrequent conditions, large numbers of cloud droplets coalesce into larger drops of water reaching what most observers would term drizzle or rain. Sometimes a snow crystal will capture one of these drops and it will subsequently freeze onto the snowflake. Two examples are shown here.

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© Copyright, Gregory Thompson, greg@inclouds.com, In the Clouds Photography