Snowflakes? I'll Show You!

This is the right question to ask these days, especially if you're a kid under 10 or so, but it's valid for adults of all ages as well. Times are changing and as I have been mentioning in my previous posts here and there, seasons are not the same anymore. The weather is getting warmer each year, which means winters are warmer, spring is slowly disappearing and summers are so hot, you need air conditioning to be able to live a normal life, instead of suffering day and night.

This means snow is as rare as a white raven and if you somehow, by luck you get some snow, you need to go photo shooting right away as the snow is melting like a lemon flavored ice cream on a hot summer day.

It was the penultimate day of the year, the 30th of December, when it started snowing, so I jumped into my boots, took my coat and left to capture some snowy photos.

It was fairly obvious that I would need to be very inventive as the snow on the ground was already melting, a light level of slush was forming, so there was no way I could capture ankle deep, white, untouched snow.

There was a bush at the side of the road, covered by snow, so I took a few photos. Taking macro photos is not the same as shooting some photos randomly on the go, so I had to go closer and check settings, framing and so on. As it happens, people driving by were looking at me like I was doing something illegal.

My plan was to capture individual snow flakes, but it was nearly impossible. If you enlarge the photo or zoom in on a mobile device, you can see the snowflakes, but this wasn't how I wanted.

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Individual snowflakes are extremely difficult to capture. You need to be at the right place at the right time, to catch them when they start to fall and the surface is not covered yet. Plus you need a suitable surface so the snowflakes don't melt, a surface of a good color, different from white, to have some contrast between the snowflake and surface.

On the 1st day of the year, at some point it started snowing and we got some snow to enjoy. Good thing I was home and noticed the snowfall in time. My ledge is not the best surface, but till I renovate my balcony, this has to be good.

If you haven't seen snowflakes in real life, only in cartoons or story books, here it is. This is how they look like.

I bet most of you, who have never seen snow, have an idea how the snowflakes look like, from the story books. Those are perfectly designed to look good, but you won't find that kind of precision in real life. In real life nothing is perfect. If you look closely, you can find some nice ones on the photo above.

Taking good photos in these conditions is extremely difficult. I only have my mobile phone camera, which is good, I can't really complain, but this type of macro is challenging.

My last snowflake photo shoot was three years ago I think and I remember I wanted to somehow show the readers how big a snowflake is, so I put my finger next to a snowflake and melted instantly :) Lesson learnt, so no demonstration of size this year, but trust me, they are tiny.

Look at these. Do they look like the ones you know from story books or designs on all kinds of Christmas decorations?

Most of the times you don't get a snowflake by itself, they are coming down in groups, or stuck together and then you get a bunch of them.

Apologies for the quality of the photos, I tried my best, but it's far from what I'd like, which is why I'm not posting these in a photo community.

Tomorrow, according to the weather forecast, it's going to snow, heavily, in the afternoon. This is good news for me, so I'm going to be ready, hoping to take some better photos, if it starts snowing before dark. Fingers crossed.

Have you ever seen what a snowflake looks like? let me know in a comment.

If you're a newbie, you may want to check out these guides: