Photographer Captures Most Detailed Snowflake Images on Record

Capturing snowflakes' beauty presented challenges for photographer Nathan Myhrvold. He decided to build his own specialized microscope camera to photograph the intricate details of individual snow crystals.

This passion project took 18 months of innovative problem-solving around issues like preventing the delicate flakes from melting.

Myhrvold's Process

Once Myhrvold created the highest-resolution snowflake camera, finding the ideal frigid shooting locations proved harder than expected. Ultimately serendipitous snowfall eventually allowed Myhrvold to capture mesmerizing, symmetric designs revealing snowflakes' hidden intricacies.

Myhrvold, co-author of the boundary-pushing five-volume art and science cookbook Modernist Cuisine, also shoots incredible photos featured in museum-quality galleries. Intrigued by physics professor Kenneth Libbrecht's snowflake microscope images, Myhrvold wanted to photograph every day yet invisible natural wonders.