Decided to start additional series of snowflake photos: Snowflake draft, in parallel with fully processed snow crystals. This will be small packs of snowflake photos, processed with simplified and more quick workflow.
My main processing workflow for snowflake photography requires lots of time and effort. I really like this work and never tired of it, because careful processing of aligned and averaged RAW stack certainly worth all efforts: resulting image looks way better than in-camera source photos. But that means that i can show you only small fraction of all nice and interesting snowflakes i capture every winter. All of my snow crystals stored in very big archive as series of RAW + JPEG photos, waiting for processing; though i suspect that most of these snowflakes will never be released – only because i can’t find enough time to process them all!
So, here is first post in draft series. For these photos, i’ll do faster processing: averaging of JPEG stacks with simplified post-processing. I will show only interesting and/or beautiful crystals (at my taste), but, to keep some intrigue, will not show best of the best snowflakes, until they processed with full workflow. 🙂
These crystals was captured 18 December 2015. This was second day of my snowflake photography this winter, and first day that brings me some nice specimens:
This large snow crystal resembles duck feet or gecko’s paw. Snowflakes of this type, if they are big enough, can be easily spot by naked eye and draws attention, thanks to their unusual and beautiful shape with thin, broad and very clean arms. Here is details of one arm without re-scaling. I like how background distorted by transparent details on crystal surface:
Very big 12-sided crystal, with complex structure and slight rime on surface:
Here is crop of it’s center in 1:1 scale. Can you find tiny hollow column snowflake on it?
Next crystal is stellar dendrite, but almost completely covered with rime. Usually, i do not like such crystals: often they carry so much rime, so they reminds pillow, almost completely opaque and even their shape barely seen. However, small amount of rime sometimes look cute: snowflake can remind massive brooch, covered by lots of tiny diamonds:
And finally, small crystal of capped column type. Although, it is bigger than common capped columns, and have wide caps with different size. You can see it’s thin column through transparent cap:
These snowflakes was the best from December 18. In total, 129 photos was captured; they took ~1,5 Gb in archive after packing RAWs with archiver 7-Zip (after tests, i choosed PPMd compression method and model order=3 – it gives best compression ratio for my 10bit RAW/DNG files, and also good speed).
More snowflakes in album snowflakes and snow crystals on Flickr.
Also i wrote article about snowflake macro photography.