Crystal of chaos and order

Snowflake photo: Crystal of chaos and order

Prints available at Artist website (mirrors at Pixels and FineArtAmerica), RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com.

Finally, i had 3 days of good snowflake shooting, and nice new crystals to process. This image, however, from January 2014, but next snowflakes will be fresh!

This is relatively large crystal, around 5 or 6 millimeters in diameter. if you look closely at it's center, you'll easily classify it: this is snowflake of split plate type. I encounter these crystals not too often, and usually they look quite like "normal" snowflakes at first glance, and we'll see difference only when inspect them closely. Here is another crystal of same type: Vega, and it also won't show it's true nature, if you don't magnify it:

This "chaotic" snowflake was captured on large plate of glass with LED back lighting, using Canon Powershot A650is with additional lens Helios 44M-5, reversely mounted in front of built-in camera optics. 11 identical RAWs was averaged to boost signal-noise ratio of this picture.

Here is next snowflake, that i've processed from wonderful evening snowfall of 16th january 2014 - Iron crown / Spark:

If you want to see more snowflakes, you can browse through all snowflake pictures.
Here you'll find snowflake photo wallpapers in numerous resolutions and screen proportions, up to Ultra HD 4K.
And here is article about snowflake macro photography.