NATHAN MYHRVOLD
No Two Alike

Photographing snowflakes is a bit like watching sand fall through your fingers. The difficulty of it is not just technical but also a matter of timing. Snowflakes sublimate—their sharp features degrade as the ice crystals evaporate over time, making the window to capture them fleeting. To keep the snowflakes from vaporizing too quickly, I used a cooled stage, giving more time to capture and focus-stack the images. With their microscopic size and fleeting nature, snowflakes presented one of the more monumental challenges in my photography career.

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