Lost In Bluedom PhotographyYou Local Source For Photography Know-How

Photo by CaptPiper

“No two snowflakes are alike.” It’s a phrase repeated so often that most of us accept it as fact. Though it’s not a scientific idea at all — it was simply a theory posited in 1898 by Wilson Bentley, the very first snowflake photographer, who captured close to 5,000 crystals in his lifetime.

Unlike Bentley, who put snowflakes on slides and attached a bellows camera to a compound microscope, you can use a regular Digital SLR or Digital point-and-shoot. Also, where Bentley posed his flakes on a black background, you can shoot them wherever you see them — “whether they are on wood, or stone, or on you friends shoelace.” If they are on other snow, you can still photograph them by tilting your camera to catch the sunlight on a different flake.

Shooting snowflakes is easy — just follow these tips:
• Get in as close as the camera will let you — usually about 2 inches. Hold the camera steady, and shoot from as many angles as possible.
• Aim for snowflakes that are on surfaces with clean lines and that are positioned at an angle so early morning or late afternoon sunlight can bring out details. And it also helps to find flakes in the ‘twilight zone’ areas of the snow — not in full sun or quite full shadow. This is so the background of the sunlit flake is the cobalt blue shadow that snow has on sunny days.
• Large, soft flakes photograph better than small, bright ones. You can find them at diameters up to 5mm. You need to have a lot of moisture in the air to find snowflakes this large and it needs to be bitter cold.
• Nearly windless days are ideal for snowflake hunting, to up the likelihood of finding crystals intact. Colder temperatures help to keep their little arms from melting off before you can get to them.

I challenge you to find two that are alike. Good luck in your hunting and be warm.

Tags: Tips, Winter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 9:46 pm and is filed under Article. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.