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.

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."

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."

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."

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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."

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.

"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."

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."

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