Photography: On the hunt for the perfect snowflake

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Snowflake captured by Nathan Myhrvold: The photographer travels to Alaska and Canada to get the perfect flake in front of the lens

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Nathan Myhrvold / Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC

The photographer Nathan Myhrvold spent 18 months getting one of the most delicate photo objects in the world in front of his lens: the snowflake. That was how long Myhrvold, former Chief Technical Officer of Microsoft, worked on the machine, which finally managed to photograph the flakes in particularly detailed and clear manner. Myhrvold connected his camera to a microscope, which, according to his own statements, enabled him to have the highest resolution for flake photography in the world. Since natural light would melt the fragile structures too quickly, Myhrvold exposed them using LEDs, which emit light pulses every microsecond. He also built a cooling stage into his apparatus. In February 2020 the time had finally come: Myhrvold went on a hunt for flakes with his camera.

Myhrvold is not the first to try to capture these fleeting beauties: More than a hundred years ago, Wilson Bentley, a farmer in Vermont, took over 5000 pictures of snowflakes. Bentley actually wanted to draw the structures. But since they melted too quickly, he picked up the camera. Since Bentley's pictures all looked different, the belief was established: Every snowflake is unique. In 1988, however, Nancy Knight, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, found two apparently exactly identical flakes in a snowstorm in Wisconsin - and thus questioned the myth of uniqueness.

Anyone who goes as far as Nathan Myhrvold in developing the perfect device for flake photography does not shy away from looking for particularly photogenic specimens: This ultimately led Myhrvold to Alaska and Canada.

There you will find the perfect conditions for photo flakes: the snow is not too damp, not too dry.

And there are ice-cold temperatures at around minus 15 degrees Celsius.