TITLE: Subliminating Snowflake

Photographing snowflakes is a bit like watching sand fall through your fingers. The difficulty of it is not just technical but also a matter of timing. Snowflakes sublimate—their sharp features degrade as the ice crystals evaporate over time, making the window to capture them fleeting. In this photo, sublimation is beginning, as the outermost crystals soften and melt into droplets of water. To keep the snowflakes from vaporizing too quickly, I used a cooled stage, giving more time to capture and focus-stack the images. With their microscopic size and fleeting nature, snowflakes presented one of the more monumental challenges in my photography career.

AUTHOR: Nathan Myhrvold (United States)

Nathan Myhrvold is photographer, chef, scientist, and author. As the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, Myhrvold embraces the power of technology to push photographic limits. He and his team build custom cameras, robotics, and software to capture the world in new ways.
Myhrvold’s photography has been featured in publications including Smithsonian Magazine, Digital Photo Pro, Popular Photography, Galerie, and Bloomberg Pursuits. He is the founder of Modernist Cuisine, author of The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, and coauthor of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, Modernist Cuisine at Home, Modernist Bread, and the forthcoming Modernist Pizza.
He pioneered food photography techniques to take the avant garde photographs in his award-winning cookbooks, which garnered worldwide recognition and led to the opening of Modernist Cuisine Gallery, the first gallery in the world devoted to food photography.
When not photographing food, Myhrvold travels the globe to visually document nature and wildlife. His recent innovations in snowflake photography have resulted in the highest resolution snowflake camera in the world. An avid researcher and lover of space, Myhrvold did postdoctoral cosmology work with Stephen Hawking and is currently developing new astrophotography techniques.