Photographing Snowflakes
Professor Michael Peres

Students each winter in my Photography and the Microscope class have had the chance to photograph one of our area’s most abundant natural resources - snowflakes. In this class, which was first offered in 1988, students have photographed nearly anything that has interested them. I often share, that if they can see it, they can photograph it. Photographing snowflakes has been an exciting and more recent addition to the class.

In 2002, one of the department’s alumna, Emily Marshall had been inspired over her winter break by the b & w photomicrographs of snowflakes made in the early 20th Century by photographer Wilson Bentley.

Emily came back to campus all excited and said, “We’ve got to photograph snowflakes.” I responded that all of our equipment was inside and there was no easy place to set it up, so it would be impossible. Later on the drive home, I felt that to be a pretty lame excuse and I decided that I should just take the microscopes outside, which I did the next day. The frst attempt was in the RIT breezeway and because the wind seems to blow constantly there(hence the name), photographing and collecting the flakes was nearly impossible to do in a my meaningful way. I then moved a microscope to my garage, six miles from campus and made a test there. Beside a small microclimate the exited in the garage, working there was just fine so long as the outside temperature was colder than 28 F. So now during the winter, a workbench in my garage holds several microscopes, fiber-optic lights, a digital camera, and sometimes a computer.

Photographing snowflakes presents many challenges for the class. To make really nice photographs of the actual flakes requires a bit of work and some luck. The flakes must be caught before touching the ground. Students accomplish this by using pieces of black velvet laid into old developing trays. The typical Rochester winter will average more than 100+ inches of snow. During the winter, I constantly watch the weather forecast and evaluate my best guess to see if the day will have the chance for photographing snowflakes and try to alert the students, who get a brief demonstration and then they are off and running.

Rochester’s snow sometimes comes in feet or as a gentle dusting. It can be a good snow for photographing or ”ugly” snow. Once flakes hits the ground, they begin to change in small ways almost immediatel and so flakes must be caught and photographed before they joins with other ice crystals and become compressed and/or dirty on the ground.

When photographing snowflakes, one quickly realizes there are many variables. The snow may or may not be visually interesting. It may contain ice pellets or needles instead of flakes. In Rochester, we get a lot of what I refer to as “ugly snow”. Ugly snow is most often the result of lake effect snow. Photographing snowflakes is completely weather dependent. It is difficult to predict the type of snow that will arrive even when much snow is in the forecast. The formation of the flake itself is dependent on the various temperatures it experiences, the relative humidity, altitiude and magnetic fields in the atmosphere when the falling. There are a number of variables, which makes coordinating photography for the class ever so complicated and nearly impossible as a group event. In fact, it is a random event at best that a good snowfall occurs during the scheduled class time.

Isolating snowflakes is fun and the best flakes. The best flakes in Rochester seem to be produced when the air temperatures are very cold and the snow is not produced from the lake effect cycle. Photographing this way requires patience in trying to isolate and transfer the best flakes to clean microscope slides while working in the outdoors and sometimes at night. When the flake is ready to be photographed, students will use a variety of techniques such as darkfield of Rheinberg. What I have found is that the most successful photos are the result of improvisation and the blending of multiple lighting methods.