Another snowflake....

[Gerd]

Merry Christmas, happy holidays and a healthy new year !
Regards from Duesseldorf, Germany,
Gerd

[Charles Krebs]

Very lovely image Gerd!

Merry Christmas to you as well.

(Now tell us a little more about how you made this pictrure!)

[arturoag75]

Hi,
very good subject..probably i'll never see one i my town!
Happy Christmas to everybody!
arturo

[Gerd]

Thanks, Charles, and here is my howto:
this is a varnish imprint again, I used thinned Pertex, cooled outside, to catch the flakes on a
microscope slide with a thin "paint film".
Pertex is a mounting media for microscopy, you can use nail varnish too....
It takes about 30 minutes before the thin film with the flakes will be dry.
I took the slides inside to evaporate the water of the melted snowflakes.
It is much more comfortable to take a closer look at the remaining imprints
with a warm microscope in a warm house...
For Illumination i used a setup similar to that one of Kenneth Libbrecht here :
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snow ... photo2.htm
a combination of oblique lighting and Rheinberg illumination.
After shooting, i cut out the snow crystal in Photoshop to eliminate the thick
varnish outside the crystal shape. A little bit improvement in contrast and a new
background colour, that's it .....
Thanks for looking,
Gerd

[Cactusdave]

Interesting 'how to', thanks Gerd. How did you manage to keep the nice 'drop shadow' of the snowflake on the background when you cut it out in Photoshop, or was that added afterwards? If so it's extremely realistic.

[Gerd]

Thanks, Dave. The little 'drop shadow' was added in Photoshop later.
I found, this shadow made the snowcrystal come out of the screen,
so i kept it to underline the threedimensionality...
Gerd

[kvejlend]

Gerd: very nice snowflake !!!! good job