Frozen hearts

Snowflake photo: Frozen hearts

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

Maybe this is "8 March snowflake" or "Valentine's day snowflake", but actually it was captured in January 2015. This tiny hexagonal plate crystal, lesser than 1 millimeter in size, shows us unusual pattern of six elements with heart shape, pointing at corners of hexagon. This is first case when i saw something resembling heart inside of snow crystal.

Unfortunately, i photographed this crystal not as good as it deserves: from 8 serial shots, which i've took for averaging process, 5 photos have poor lighting, and i had only three good source shots to work with. So, i've tried my best to remove noise as possible while preserving all significant snowflake details.

I processed this crystal in warm pink colors for birthday of my girl Lucy:

Later, i've enchanced this snowflake photo for slightly better contrast and colors.

And this is alternate color version:

Snowflake photo: Frozen hearts, alternate colors

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

Also, one year after i was lucky to take photo of another snow crystal with six tiny hearts, connected to corners of central hexagon. This snowflake much bigger than first specimen:

If you want to see more snowflakes, you can browse through all snowflake pictures.
And here is article about snowflake macro photography.