It’s been a pretty miserable winter here in Columbus. Not only have we had to deal with ten inches of snow on the roads, piles of ice the size of baby elephants on the sidewalks and subzero temperatures, but we also have to deal with people calling into NPR wondering why their specific streets haven’t been plowed yet.

Jon Cowley, whose amazing macro photography we featured on the blog a few weeks ago, has decided to take advantage of the snowfall and produce another fantastic series of images.

Inspired by Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov’s series of snowflake macro shots, Jon translated his process for photographing droplets and flowers into capturing the snow’s detailed intricacies.

To create these images, Jon used a combination of his Canon 100mm Macro lens stacked with a ProMaster extension tube and Canon 2x Extender and a Canon MPE-65 Macro lens, all on a tripod with a focusing rail. Like with the previous shoot we covered, Jon sometimes focus-stacks his images.

To catch the snowflakes, Jon uses a 24”x24” sheet of glass that he places on an upside down table. For some shots, such as the above one, Jon used a Canon MT-24EX macro flash to achieve the darkened out background. For the rest he simply utilizes natural light.

His editing process includes contrast and brightness adjustments, cleaning up stray ice crystals, and adding color gradients since the photos look pretty flat straight out of camera (see below).

Check out the rest of Jon’s snowflake images below and visit his website while you’re at it!