A huge part of my appreciation for nature is snow. I have been quite obsessed with it since I first saw it back in 1987 at Diamond Lake, Oregon. My parents took me and my brother there for our first vacation during the winter, and we saw snow for the first time. Since then, it can never snow enough for me. I live in Illinois now, and winter doesn’t always bring the best snows. I thought I would share some amazing aspects of nature in single snowflakes.
This particular snow crystal is two crystals formed at one point, turned slightly to produce a 12-branched crystal!
I check Sergey Kichigin’s photos each year.
Just wanted to say your profile link is incorrect as your profile name on iNat is ethan1of1images. By the way even though you can upload each egg separately, there’s more practical sence in having one observation for the clutch, not 6.
it’s because user logins are not supposed to start with numbers. so when the system sees a number, it interprets it as a number user id based on the first set of numbers it sees – in this case, 1. ken-ichi is user number 1: https://www.inaturalist.org/users/1.
i love snow, and the way that snowflakes form symmetrically like that is something that i just can’t process. Like yes i know it isn’t magic and there are laws of physics involved, but if nothing else a universe with laws of physics that do things like that is pretty magical :)
And then just think of the untold trillions of snowflakes no one ever sees up close.
I’ve only taken phone photos but my friend has gotten some pretty nice macro ones. Vermont has some wonderful snow thus being the home of Snowflake Bentley long ago
I still remember when I was a kid – Rhode Island in winter is frequently “too cold for snow,” as the locals say, but we got at least some snow each year. I remember distinctly, sitting down in the snow on a sunny day, and noticing that each snowflake was a different color: pink, blue, green, yellow, and if I moved my head a little, those all disappeared and different ones appeared, also all different colors.
Excellent pictures! As a mineral enthusiast as well as a chemist that studied crystalline materials in grad school, I really like these. They really bring out the beautiful aesthetic of natural order. As much as I love iNat, biological systems are so much messier. Snowflakes are wonderful examples of how infinite variety is still possible within the constraints of an ordered system.
Olympus Em1 Mark 2 camera with the MC-20 teleconverter connected to the 60mm macro lens using an extension tube modification I created 4 years ago. Also the Raynox 250 or the 202 to get between 5x and 7x magnification for focus bracketing. I then stack the images either in-camera or in helicon
You would love my sand grain photos then….
I find garnets in the sand from Bandon, Oregon and set them on another grain for my main subject in photography
