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.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:32PM (12 children)
... and you can take clear pictures of as many snowflakes as you can stand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:48PM
Clitons new book has 512 snowflakes, the biggest is named on the cover.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:09PM (2 children)
Grrrarrhhhhh! You beat me to it!!! I was going to write "Well someone had to say it. That website is full of special snowflakes." but you stole my thunder, my pretty snowy thunder. :(
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:42PM (1 child)
Thanks for the photo.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:55PM
Just need a slightly bigger one as my new desktop background.
Nah, I'll photoshop 4 of them together, that will do
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:39PM
... except that they are not unique or one of a kind. They are all the same.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by DeathMonkey on Thursday September 21 2017, @09:18PM (3 children)
.... and you can take clear pictures of as many snowflakes as you can stand.
True, but at least they're in shape. It's the Republican snowflakes that tend to be macro.
(Score: 1, Troll) by DeathMonkey on Thursday September 21 2017, @10:28PM (2 children)
Oh no! The Republican snowflakes are coming from inside the thread!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @11:06PM (1 child)
How dare you turn the joke around! Should've just modded them flamebait for their HUMOR.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Friday September 22 2017, @03:00PM
They've just demonstrated who the actual snowflakes are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @09:45PM
Came in here for this, wasn't disappointed. A+, would snort again.
(Score: 2) by snufu on Friday September 22 2017, @12:27AM
Warning: Snowflake photography at macro distance may violate safe space.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Friday September 22 2017, @03:57AM
You're lucky. I misread the title "Snowflake Macro Pornography." What an intense feeling of horror, dread, and perverse curiosity. Are these the sexy lesbian snowflakes or the 'unique' ones? And macro? Just how macro? I see STDs macro?
It was goatse meets tub girl during a two girls one cup rickroll party.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:51PM (2 children)
This is a perfect example of how much beauty there is out there on the internet. Well, other than the porn of course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @10:28PM (1 child)
Snowflake porn.
There is probably a Reddit for it already.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @11:33PM
there is but it has no posts :( [reddit.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by hendrikboom on Friday September 22 2017, @01:28AM
See also Don Komarechka. Every winter he posts snowflake photos on his Google plus account. He usually explains how these snowflakes probably formed -- interesting meteorology.
his photography website [donkom.ca]
hundreds of snowflakes [skycrystals.ca]
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday September 22 2017, @03:30PM
But why would I want to photograph a snowflake macro? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.