Snowflake Photographs - Snowflake Posters and Books

How can something as ephemeral as a snowflake, or snow crystal, be photographed?   People like physicist Kenneth Libbrecht have developed methods for photographing snowflakes, such as this beautiful snow crystal image to the right.

It takes painstaking care and a willingness to spend hours in very cold weather to find, prepare, and photograph snowflakes. 

The best 6-sided lacy snowflakes, such as the photo to the right, are found when the temperature is about 5 degrees Fahrenheit (-15 degrees Celcius), although sometimes they can be found at just below freezing.

Kenneth Libbrecht is a physicist at Caltech who studies how snow crystals are formed, and he's one of the top snowflake photographers of the world.  The images you see on this page are from photos by Libbrecht.  

Of course to find snowflakes to photograph, he has to spend time out in very cold weather while it's snowing. 

In the video below, you can see Libbrecht carefully transferring snowflakes with a small paint brush to a glass microscope slide, then placing the slide under a specially made camera with a magnifying lens.   The camera is set up in the back of his van. 

Often he has less than a minute to photograph the snowflake before it melts too much to be useful. Sometimes the snowflake disappears in a puff of wind before he can even get it to his camera.

The best  6-sided snowflakes form at 5 - 10 degrees Fahrenheit.  That's cold!  And as you can see from the video, he needs to keep his fingers free to be able to work with the snowflakes and the camera. 

Kenneth Libbrecht says some of the best places in North America to find good snowflake conditions are in northern Ontario, northern Michigan, and Vermont.

Have you ever taken time to look carefully at snowflakes?   If so, you'll have discovered that they come in many different shapes and forms.  

Most often the snow particles are irregular, blob-shaped snow crystals that are clumped together.  The symmetrical six-sided snow crystals are only formed under certain weather conditions.    Sometimes these six-sided flakes will have a simple design, while others may be be branched (dendritic) or fern-like.  

Other weather conditions may form columnar or needle-like crystals, hexagonal plates, or triangular-shaped snow crystals.  Occasionally there are 12-sided crystals.  Temperature, humidity, and wind speed where the snowflake, or snow crystal, is being formed determine its shape and size.   

Because of the shape of water molecules, the symmetry of snowflakes will always be 6-sided (or 12, or sometimes more like a 3-sided crystal).   You'll never find symmetrical 5, or 7, or 8-sided snowflakes.  

Go to Libbrecht's Snowflake Morphology Diagram (from A Snowflake Primer) to see how temperature and humidity (water saturation) affect the shape of snowflakes.

Kenneth Libbrecht categorizes snowflakes into 35 shapes.  If you take a look at his Table of Snow Crystal Shapes, you'll see that the six-sided snow crystals, or snowflakes make up just a few of the possible shapes.