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posted by CoolHand on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the loving-special-snowflakes dept.

Spotted at HackerNews is a link to Alexey Kljatov's blog on snowflake macro photography.

The HN thread links to this 2013 posting on the equipment used in the setup:

Some people think that snowflake photography is a complex matter, and requires expensive equipment, but in fact it can be inexpensive, very interesting and quite easy, after some practice.

Currently, i use low cost variation of well-known lens reversal macro technique: compact camera Canon Powershot A650is at maximum optical zoom (6x) shoots through lens Helios 44M-5 (taken from old film camera Zenit, made in USSR), reversely mounted in front of built-in camera optics. Compared to Canon A650 standard macro mode, this simple setup achieves much better magnification and details, lesser chromatic aberrations and blurring at image corners, but also very shallow depth of field.

I capture every snowflake as short series of identical photos (usually 8-10, for most interesting and beautiful crystals - 16 shots and more), and average it (after aligning, for every resulting pixel take arithmetical mean of corresponding pixels from all shots of series) at very first stage of processing workflow. Averaging technique dramatically reduces noise and reveals thin and subtle details and color transitions, which almost unseen in every single shot from series, because they masked by noise.

The Original HN Thread is here and also contains a link to Alexey's Flickr page with more of the results.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:48PM (#571362)

    Clitons new book has 512 snowflakes, the biggest is named on the cover.