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“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
~ T.S. Eliot

Many have asked how I am managing to capture snowflakes and while I would love to tell you it takes great skillful skill and great speedy speed:) there really is no other magic to it than patience, luck, and a little bit of know how. This shot is good, and I managed to grab some of the detail but it could have been better. I think there are some things that might help, like a tiny little paint brush to help gently brush away snow that insistently falls on top of your perfect snowflakes JUST AS YOU SHOOT them -AHHHH! lol:) *Note to self...buy small paintbrush for just such a purpose. I plan to keep trying, as the weather allows.

Here are some things I think are very important, for any of you who want to give it a try. Those of you in the Northeast seem to be getting plenty of opportunity for it.:)

1. The temperature and wind conditions. It has to be cold enough and still enough that when the snowflakes are falling, they don't instantly melt or blow away. You need them to stick around for a few seconds. A good way to test this, is to just go outside and see if they are sticking to your clothes. There are things you can do to block the wind, but I haven't done that yet. I will be learning about this in a macro class this spring and I'll tell you about it then. Wind will absolutely make it impossible. In fact, even a slight breeze will make it a more frustrating experience than you'd probably like to have.

2. It helps if you have something colorful or textured for them to fall on. In my last two shots, I actually used my fading flowers. I left them out on the deck for a short time to get cold.

3. Good glass. You will have a very hard time capturing snowflakes without a very good lens. I use two...Canon's 100mm macro lens, which is probably one of the best lenses in my bag, and an old FD 50mm lens in reverse. If you have no idea what the Reverse Lens Method is, check out the description in my macro set and read the article I wrote on the subject for The Magic In Pixels. (There's a link in the set description.) It'll open your eyes to a whole new world.

4. Always use Live View on your camera and a remote shutter or cable release, or at least a 2 second delay. If you don't know how, drag out the manual and read about it. My camera allows me to zoom up 10 times so I am able to focus by watching until it clears up on Live View. This is how I do most of my work that has a really tight dof. Keep your ISO to 100 or 200 so the detail will be good and use a tripod if you can. I've gotten some handheld shots, but it's extremely difficult to do.

5. Crop your image in post. If you did well on #4, you should be able to crop to a very small area to feature just the snowflake. This is why good glass and a low ISO are so important. Otherwise, you'll end up with a very noisy, grainy image that will be disappointing.

6. Don't give up. It'll try your patience, but the result is pretty cool.:)

*I created a snowflake set today, if you'd like to see all of the ones I've captured so far.:)

November 2nd, 2009 - New York, United States

Ruskin famously complained that the new craze for photography - he was writing in the 19th century - meant that no-one really looked at anything any more : they simply pointed their cameras at whatever was before them. He believed that everyone should learn to draw and that tourists should sketch what they saw instead of photographing it - because to draw something, one is required truly to observe it, to look beyond the superficial.

These days, people don't even seem to want to take the time to look properly at works of art in galleries or museums. They race through, presumably so they can say they've "done" MoMA or The Louvre, in the same way they've "done" New York or France, simply by virtue of having set foot there, waved their cameras around and clicked the shutter a few times.

I swear, it's the new form of cultural tourism : you go to a gallery, and instead of looking at the works of art, you simply photograph all the descriptions.

I can just imagine the conversations around the world, as these intrepid travelers, returned home, proudly recount their adventures to their friends and families :

"Yeah, and then we went to this museum where we saw this really great painting of a flag."
"My, that sounds fascinating. And which flag was it supposed to be ?"
"Oh, it was that famous one. You know - from that really big country. The one next to Canada. You know the one. It's on the tip of my tongue. Wait, I think I have a photograph of the details here..."