Flower within a flower

Snowflake picture: Flower within a flower, tiny star-shaped snow crystal with unusually complex inner pattern, sparkling on bright gradient background in cold LED back light
Snowflake photo: Flower within a flower

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



This tiny snowflake was not bigger than 1 millimeter from tip to tip. Despite it's simple shape, typical for such small snow crystal, it have really amazing, dense and complex pattern inside central hexagon and near of outer rim. Inner pattern remind me flower, placed with recursion within another flower; and 12 elements in outer pattern resembles resistors on print circuits. So, this is some sort of "computer-inspired snowflake". :)

9 identical RAW photos was taken as quick series, aligned and averaged for dramatically better signal/noise ratio of this picture. It was captured on large sheet of glass with LED back lighting, using Canon Powershot A650is and additional lens Helios 44M-5, reversely mounted in front of camera's optics, January 2015 in Moscow, Russia.

Here is another small snowflake from this January, which also have unusually complex pattern for it's size - Forget-me-not:

Snowflake picture: Forget-me-not, small flower-like snow crystal with unusualy complex and intricate inner pattern, sparkling on blue-gray gradient background

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.