Photographing Individual Snowflakes

I have finally managed to photograph individual snowflakes with DSLR camera. Years ago I have made nice images with my old Minolta attached to microscope but microscope just doesn’t work all that well with my Canon EOS, I don’t know why. For these shots I was using Minolta 50mm 1:1 macro lens with MD/EOS adapter ring and 2X macro extender, focusing rail, off-camera Speedlite in manual mode and heavy-duty Manfrotto tripod. Aperture, shutter speed and focusing were all manual. For capturing the snowflakes I used black steel chalkboard that was cooled down for few minutes in a freezer and then placed in open area on the deck. When I had few snowflakes on chalkboard I placed it under the lens that was already pre-focused. This way I had to do only minimal re-focusing when I moved the board around. As you can see on picture of my setup, it was 0°C (32°F) when I took my shots and shortly after the snow turned to rain. We have very un-usual winter here in Southern Ontario, not too many opportunities to play around with this technique.

Very wet snow.

All snowflake pictures were shot @ ISO 100, f/11@1/200, Speedlite flash with difuser@1/2 power. Macro lens extender pushed the aperture to f/22