Home » license » print » snowflake » Under the grey sky

Under the grey sky

Under the grey sky, dark collage with grid of square tiles, containing real snowflake macro photos on blurred background
Snowflake collage: Under the grey sky

For this collage i used special variants of four snowflake photos. When processing each snowflake, i draw by hand precise mask, which separates crystal from background (i need it for processing object and background with different sharpening and noise removing settings). Drawing these mask is time consuming work, and requires lots of patience; but automatic methods of edge selection, which i've tried, do not provide enough quality. Now masks was used to blur background around snowflakes.

I'm not sure that these variants are good, though, because original background is visible through transparent crystals. You can see original snowflake photos: Rigel, Leaves of ice, Alioth and Vega on unchanged background.



Dark grey woolen fabric looks quite strange on high magnification, and i cannot say that wool fibers looks beautiful. On the other hand, these thin and rigid fibers are works really well for shooting process: they effectively trap snowflake and prevent wind to blow it away; also, snowflake usually hangs in the air above wool fabric, touching fibers only at few points. This slows down melting, which is very important in warm days, when temperature is too close to freezing point.

You can see visual difference in size of crystals in this collage, and it is real: all four snowflakes was captured at same distance from the lens and with fixed magnification, and i do not re-scaled photos on post-processing stage.

Prints available at: Artist website, RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com.

This is bigger variant of collage, twice wide and tall:

Under the grey sky (2x variant), dark square collage with grid of real snowflake macro photos on blur background
Snowflake collage: Under the grey sky (2x)

Prints available at: Artist website, RedBubble.com.
Licenses for commercial use - at Shutterstock.com.

And here you'll find other collages with numerous snowflakes:

Snowflake images: light blue collage with grid of 25 square tiles with real snow crystals, captured on glass with cold back lightingSnowflake images: collage with square grid of 25 tiles with photos of real snow crystals on dark blue woolen background in natural light
Square collage with 18 closeup pictures of real snowflakes, glowing on dark gray textured backgroundSquare collage with 21 different macro photos of real snowflakes in overlapping frames on pale blue - brown textured 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.