Snow and Ice

While once again trying to decide what to feature this week I searched the internet for interesting ideas.  Being a bit under the weather for most of the week didn't help my motivation any but I did find this site on photographing individual snowflakes that looked interesting.

I got lucky and Friday's weather brought light snow flurries and temps in the mid 20's.  I put my knit cap out on the railing of the front porch and waited for it to cool down and some flakes to land on it.  In the meantime I got my camera with the 105mm macro lens attached and my tripod setup and waited to see what might become available to photograph.  I succeeded in capturing a few flakes but none are as spectacular as those in the blog link provided above.  I also had a small piece of glass with me in hopes of using his other technique of photographing the flakes through the glass to see its crystalline structure better but I couldn't get any flakes to stay long enough.   Once again, I have learned a few things from this experiment and look forward to trying it again in the future should weather conditions allow.

Frost on the caravan window

Worried that my snowflakes pictures would not be good enough to share (they are OK but I wish they were better) I took some pictures of ice and frost on our caravan that stays parked in the driveway these days.  The results here were interesting, particularly the snow and ice from the windshield with its emerald green color.  Its not worthy of bumping a snowflake from top billing this week, but came close.  These shots were taken handheld with a burst of exposures that were then staked and auto merged in photoshop to get the necessary depth of field.

Ice and snow on the windshield

I intended to use the focus stacking technique on the snowflakes with my camranger (like I did with the Pooh ornaments in last week's posting) but weather conditions changed before I could get that setup.  I did try manual focus changes with one or two of the shots. These are made up of 2 or 3 frames with slight focus differences and then processed in Photoshop.  This still did not achieve the full depth of field I would have liked.  Hopefully this does give you an idea of just how detailed a snowflake really is.