Sleet and Snowflake Macros

I try to do some photography with my phone and clip-on macro lens with every snow event. On the 13th, the snow event was mostly sleet, but I enjoyed looking at and photographing the tiny spheres of ice. I caught them on a red glass plate...and also scooped a few onto the plate from the surface of the deck. Sleet is more durable to rough treatment that snowflakes! The icy spheres have swirls in them…smaller ones are stuck to larger ones…sometimes there is a visible fracture. My lens is a 65x magnification, so these are very small.

On the 19th, the tail end of our cold weather was snow rather than freezing rain. The temperature was about 30 degrees – a bit colder than my previous snowflake photography forays…and it turned out to be an interesting session. The flakes looked somewhat flattened….not as delicate as they might be if the temperature was lower. But – I didn’t have the challenge of inseparable aggregates that was the norm for my sessions when the temperature was just a few degrees warmer. I used a black acrylic tile to catch the flakes and then to photography them. It sat outside on the covered deck for several hours to cool down. I was pleased with the results…chagrined that I had forgotten to turn on the light associated with the clip-on lens; the pictures would have been even better with the extra light….an improvement I’ll make next time!