Snowflake Architecture — Single Crystal Study

Description

Photographing individual snowflakes at high magnification requires collecting falling flakes on a pre-cooled glass slide and transferring immediately to a cold stage microscope before thermal degradation begins — a process that allows approximately 90 seconds of photography per crystal before sublimation begins to round the crystal edges. This photograph was made using a specialized cold-stage macro system in northern Finland during a snowfall of dendritic stellar crystals — the type with the classic six-branch symmetry most associated with the ‘snowflake’ archetype. The individual crystal shown is approximately 2.8mm tip-to-tip, photographed at 6:1 optical magnification in diffuse transmitted light against a dark blue background achieved with a gel-filtered back illuminator.