Winter can be a dull season for macro photographers. Many of the usual subjects are desolate, lifeless or invisible. However, there is one subject that’s often in abundance outdoors (depending on where you live): snowflakes. There have been many strategies for photographing these ice crystals over the past century, but the simple stage of an old mitten is ideal.
Read more…

Japanese photographer Satoki Nagata moved to Chicago in 1992 to document the city and its people. His background is in neuroscience (he has a PhD in the field), but his passion is creating intimate documentary photography projects in his city.

During a recent winter, Nagata decided to try his hand at using a flash for street photography at night. Instead of mounting his flash to his camera, however, he decided to use it off camera. Combined with the light rain and falling snow, the flash turned many of his photographs into abstract and surreal images that almost look as though he overlaid photographs of stars.
Read more…

Apparently if you shoot in certain environments that are cold enough, beautiful patterns of snow and ice form on the front element of your lens. This is what photographer Alessandro Della Bella‘s glass looked like as he was shooting at an altitude of around 10,000 feet on Mount Titlis in temperatures of around 1° F.
Read more…

Earlier today, we showed you a number of time-lapse videos of Winter Storm Nemo that were created by people who were stuck indoors due to the heavy snowfall. New York-based photographer Brian Maffitt was also stuck indoors and he also turned to photography, but instead of shooting time-lapse photos, he turned to a different technique: long-exposure light painting.

His technique is rather interesting: instead of a flashlight, Maffitt projected a movie onto the falling snow in order to light up the snowflakes.
Read more…

If you’re looking for a bizarre photo concept to try out, and live in a cold snowy environment, look no further than Yorkshire, UK-based photographer Oliver Turpin‘s Snow Portraits project. Turpin shot a series of self-portraits, but instead of photographing his real face, he captured photos of imprints of his face in snow.
Read more…

Polish photographer Marcin Ryczek captured this gorgeous black-and-white photograph of a man feeding ducks and swans in Kraków, Poland (here’s a high-res version of the photo).

It’s amazing how picture perfect the framing and the scene are. The photo is like a spontaneous yin-yang image, with the man dressed in black in front of white snow, and white swans swimming on dark water. Unsurprisingly, the image is going viral online.

(via Marcin Ryczek Fotografia via Reddit via Bored Panda)

P.S. Here’s an strangely similar photograph by Reddit user skrobul.

Thanks for sending in the tip, Deebo!

If I get a photography idea, I tend to just go with it and see if it works. I had driven out to my parent’s place early in the day and the idea just came to me. I think at first I thought, “Man, I wish I had thought to shoot moon-lit snow the day before when you could make a snow man for the op.”
Read more…

Russian photographer Andrew Osokin is a master of winter macro photography. His photo collection is chock full of gorgeous super-close-up photographs of insects, flowers, snow, and frost. Among his most impressive shots are photographs of individual snowflakes that have fallen upon the ground and are in the process of melting away. The shots are so detailed and so perfectly framed that you might suspect them of being computer-generated fabrications.
Read more…

Winter is just around the corner, and the Canadian government has plans for a crazy photographic science project to welcome it. The goal of the effort will be to capture images of a single falling snowflake. They plan to use an extremely fast (and presumably expensive) camera that’s capable of capturing detailed footage of the flakes as they float down to Earth.
Read more…

Artist Simon Beck needed a way to get exercise without aggravating his problematic feet, and discovered that walking around in the snow with rigid boots and snowshoes resulted in the least amount of pain. He then came up with the amazing idea of doing crop circle-style designs in large expanses of untracked snow.

Beck spends the good part of a day — between five to nine hours — plodding along according to a pre-planned design. Once each piece is finished, he photographs them from a higher vantage point to preserve them before sunlight, wind, or snow erases them from the face of the Earth. The art is so large that some of the pieces cover entire valleys.
Read more…