Go Back

Ashburn, VA

55°F
Location Chevron down
Location News Videos
Use Current Location
Recent

Ashburn

Virginia

55°
No results found.
Try searching for a city, zip code or point of interest.
settings
Ashburn, VA Weather
Today WinterCast Local {stormName} Tracker Hourly Daily Radar MinuteCast Monthly Air Quality Health & Activities

Around the Globe

Hurricane Tracker

Severe Weather

Radar & Maps

News

News & Features

Astronomy

Business

Climate

Health

Recreation

Sports

Travel

Video

Podcasts

Winter Center

Top Stories AccuWeather Early AccuWeather Prime Astronomy Climate Travel Health Recreation Business Sports

News / Weather News

Photographer captures the most detailed images of snowflakes on record

It took 18 months of painstaking work to develop a camera capable of capturing such incredible detail. Why go to such great lengths? Well -- when you see the rest of Nathan Myhrvold's photos, you'll know why.

By Monica Danielle, AccuWeather senior producer

Updated Dec 14, 2022 1:47 PM EDT

Copied
Live Coverage For all things weather, 24 hours a day.

Photographer Nathan Myhrvold created stunning, never-seen-before high-resolution photos of snowflakes. Here’s how he did it.

Any snowfall can be a headache and all-out nuisance for many of us each winter.

Yet Mother Nature’s burden is also a wonder to behold. For photographer Nathan Myhrvold, capturing the beauty of individual snowflakes presented a unique challenge.

Myhrvold is co-author of Modernist Cuisine, a boundary-pushing five-volume cookbook on the art and science of cooking. He also shoots incredible photos that seem more at home on the walls of a museum than in the pages of a cookbook. In fact, there are Modernist Cuisine galleries featuring Myhrvold's work in Las Vegas, New Orleans, Seattle and San Diego.

Myhrvold has led a storied life. He retired from his position as Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft in 1999 with a desire to pursue new challenges, including a lifelong passion for cooking and photography.

Myhrvold was brilliant, hilarious and quick to laugh as he told AccuWeather how his desire to photograph snowflakes began. No stranger to shooting difficult subjects, he decided he’d like to photograph common things people experience every day. But he wanted the subjects of his pictures to be objects that you can't see with the naked eye - and bring them into focus.

"I was doing a series of pictures of things where they're common or they're even essential, but people don't know what they look like. For example, hops for beer," Myhrvold explained. "OK, like a billion people will sit down and have a beer tonight, and essentially none of them know what hops looks like."

Nathan Myhrvold (Modernist Cuisine Gallery, LLC)

It got him ruminating on how most of us experience snowflakes at one time or another but don't know what they really look like. He remembered some photographs of snowflakes that physicist Kenneth Libbrecht took with a special microscope he had created, so Myhrvold decided to make his own camera to specifically address the challenges of photographing tiny, ethereal ice crystals.

"Few things are as delicate and ephemeral as a snowflake," Modernist Cuisine notes. "Which is one of the reasons Nathan felt compelled to tackle the subject matter for his new micro-photography series at the gallery." 

Creating your own combination microscope camera that can perform in cold weather is no easy feat, but Myhrvold had built his own microscope setups before to shoot food for the cookbooks. Still, the technology involved was daunting, he told AccuWeather.

"For example, metal parts will expand and contract with temperature, so I made the frame of my microscope out of carbon fiber because carbon fiber basically doesn't expand or contract," Myhrvold said. "Then, because some of the metal parts do expand and contract, we had to invent a very interesting mechanism to allow you to keep everything aligned perfectly, even though parts of it were expanding and contracting quite a bit as we went from outside to inside."

Ice Queen, Nathan Myhrvold / Modernist Cuisine Gallery, LLC. Shot in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada

Making sure the flakes didn't melt on the microscope slide before he was able to photograph them was also difficult. But Myhrvold finds a challenge inspiring. He decided to use artificial sapphire instead of glass since glass transmits heat well.

"We then chill that artificial sapphire to make sure it stays cold," he explained, "and the reason it might not stay cold is if we touch it when we're putting a new snowflake down or we're putting a light through there and the light, if it's bright enough, that can cause either the slide to heat up or the snowflake to heat up."

GET THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP

  •   Have the app? Unlock AccuWeather Alerts™ with Premium+

The manner of lighting the snowflake required some research and finesse as well. "We needed it to flash brightly, but for a very short amount of time so it wouldn't mess up the snowflake," Myhrvold said.

Ultimately, he found a Japanese company that created special LED lights that would flash on for as little as one-millionth of a second.

It took 18 months, but Myhrvold created the highest-resolution snowflake camera in the world. Once the equipment was ready, there was another challenge waiting: Finding the right location proved harder than he originally envisioned.

"I originally thought, 'Oh, I'll go to ski resorts, and that's where I'll find my balcony. And I'll go out into the ski resort, and we can catch snowflakes for a while," he recalled having imagined. "Then we can go to the hot tub and it'll be awesome.' But no, to get that kind of cold and snow on a regular basis, you have to go up to the Arctic. So, Canada and Alaska are where I have been for this."

Yellowknife Flurry, Nathan Myhrvold / Modernist Cuisine Gallery, LLC. Shot in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada

He set up on balconies in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, in freezing temperatures with his microscope camera and a piece of cardboard covered in velvet to capture flakes as they fell.

“So I’ll be sitting out there on the balcony watching the snow come, and all the sudden you’ll get a particular kind of snowflake and that will last for a minute or it might last for an hour, and, boom, you get a different kind.”

He explains that it all comes down to temperature. According to Myhrvold, the nicest-looking flakes form at 5 degrees Fahrenheit or colder. At that temperature, hexagonal -- or six-sided -- and symmetric snowflakes typically develop.

Myhrvold says he would catch hundreds of snowflakes and study them with a jeweler's loupe. Not every flake is photogenic. Some stick together, others break. On a single 8-by-11 piece of cardboard, Myhrvold estimates he can see about 1,000 snowflakes at once. From there, he tries to pick the best ones to photograph.

No Two Alike, Nathan Myhrvold / Modernist Cuisine Gallery, LLC. Shot in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.

"We look at them with a light, and even though they're very tiny, the best ones always sparkle like crazy."

He uses a very tiny sable watercolor paintbrush to transfer the best individual flakes onto his microscope slide.

"Whenever it snowing, it's actually fairly dry out, so it's easy to generate static electricity," he said. "You can just rub the brush on your sleeve, and you put the tip of the brush near the snowflake and it'll actually hop up onto it."

Tripytch, Nathan Myhrvold / Modernist Cuisine Gallery, LLC. Shot in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.

His unwavering perseverance has resulted in the highest-resolution images of snowflakes on record, yet Myhrvold says he's far from finished. "I call my snowflake photos the highest-resolution snowflake photos taken. I don't think they're the most beautiful yet, because I just haven't seen enough snowflakes."

He hopes to continue to share the delicate, ephemeral beauty of snow that we often forget about because we're unable to see it with the naked eye.

“It is awesome when you do see the flakes, and the thing I love about it is, it is sort of an undiscovered bit of beauty," he reflected. "Often we get focused on, 'Oh God, I have to put chains on the car,' or 'I won't be able to get back up the hill if I leave today, so I'm stuck here.' Or all of the problems that snow would bring without looking at this incredible natural beauty that just occurs because a bunch of natural laws come together to make it … I just find that really inspiring."

More to explore:

10 years since this unforgettable scene unfolded during historic blizzard
Snow was so deep, this city had to dump it off bridges
Drone footage shows spectacular view of ghost town frozen in time
Terrifying video shows why snow squalls are so dangerous

Want next-level safety, ad-free? Unlock advanced, hyperlocal severe weather alerts when you subscribe to Premium+ on the AccuWeather app. AccuWeather Alerts™ are prompted by our expert meteorologists who monitor and analyze dangerous weather risks 24/7 to keep you and your family safer.

Report a Typo
Comments that don't add to the conversation may be automatically or manually removed by Facebook or AccuWeather. Profanity, personal attacks, and spam will not be tolerated.
Comments
Hide Comments

Weather News

Weather Forecasts

Sweltering, record-shattering heat wave roasts Puerto Rico

Jun. 9, 2023
Severe Weather

Forecasters tracking new threat of severe weather

Jun. 9, 2023
Climate

El Nino is officially underway. Here’s what that means for the weather

Jun. 9, 2023
Show more Show less Chevron down

Topics

Top Stories

AccuWeather Early

AccuWeather Prime

Astronomy

Climate

Travel

Health

Recreation

Business

Sports

Top Stories

Weather Forecasts

When will Canadian wildfire smoke return to the Northeast?

10 hours ago

Hurricane

Tropical Atlantic dormant, but may stir again soon

11 hours ago

Weather Forecasts

Needed rain on the way for Midwest, Northeast

9 hours ago

Weather News

2-year-old dies after being left in hot car in Florida

8 hours ago

Severe Weather

Siberia swelters in record temps amid ‘worst heat wave in history’

15 hours ago

More Stories

Featured Topic

Your Local Asthma Forecast

Featured Stories

Live Blog

AccuWeather’s Hurricane Week: An inside look at these destructive forc...

LATEST ENTRY

Katharine Hepburn was nearly killed in a surprise hurricane in 1938

1 day ago

Business

Top Father’s Day gifts for weather-enthusiasts

10 hours ago

Hurricane

Reed Timmer recounts his top 5 most memorable hurricane interceptions

2 days ago

AccuWeather Weather News Photographer captures the most detailed images of snowflakes on record
Company
Proven Superior Accuracy About AccuWeather Digital Advertising Careers Press Contact Us
Products & Services
For Business For Partners For Advertising AccuWeather APIs AccuWeather Connect Podcast RealFeel® and RealFeel Shade™
Apps & Downloads
iPhone App Android App See all Apps & Downloads
Subscription Services
AccuWeather Premium AccuWeather Professional
More
AccuWeather Ready Business Health Hurricane Leisure and Recreation Severe Weather Space and Astronomy Sports Travel Weather News Winter Center
Company
Proven Superior Accuracy About AccuWeather Digital Advertising Careers Press Contact Us
Products & Services
For Business For Partners For Advertising AccuWeather APIs AccuWeather Connect Podcast RealFeel® and RealFeel Shade™
Apps & Downloads
iPhone App Android App See all Apps & Downloads
Subscription Services
AccuWeather Premium AccuWeather Professional
More
AccuWeather Ready Business Health Hurricane Leisure and Recreation Severe Weather Space and Astronomy Sports Travel Weather News Winter Center
© 2023 AccuWeather, Inc. "AccuWeather" and sun design are registered trademarks of AccuWeather, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Cookie Policy | Do Not Sell My Data checkmark Confirmed Not Selling Your Data

We have updated our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.

I Understand

Get AccuWeather alerts as they happen with our browser notifications.

Notifications Enabled

Thanks! We’ll keep you informed.

FEEDBACK