![]() “My camera’s flash is one-millionth of a second and a thousand times faster than that of a typical camera flash.” “Light could melt the snowflake, so I found a company in Japan that makes LED lights for industrial purposes,” he says. ![]() Every single part of his Frankenstein-esque device, which stands at about five feet in height off the ground when placed on a table, was built using materials that are less likely to cause melting or sublimation of the subject matter. His solution: equipping his 50-pound camera system with a thermoelectric cooling system, a carbon fiber frame and LED lights, which give off less heat than standard lights. In fact, a snowflake's tendency to disintegrate was one of the biggest challenges Myhrvold had to overcome with this project. In simple terms, the system Myhrvold developed is comprised of one part microscope and one part camera, but with a number of parts that work in tandem to complete the arduous task of capturing an image of a snowflake, a subject that’s not only miniscule (most snowflakes measure less than a half-inch in diameter) but also quick to melt. Nathan Myhrvold / Modernist Cuisine Gallery, LLC More than a century later, the field of snowflake photography has continued to evolve by leaps and bounds, which is evident in the high-res images that Myhrvold has produced with his own camera. His photography is considered the inspiration for the common wisdom that “no two snowflakes are alike.” Today he's considered a pioneer for his work, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution Archives. In the late 1880s, a Vermont farmer by the name of Wilson Bentley began shooting snowflakes at a microscopic level on his farm. “About two years ago, I thought it was a good time and decided to put together a state-of-the-art snowflake photography system.but it was a lot harder than I thought.” “In the back of my mind, I thought I’d really like to take snowflake pictures,” Myhrvold says. Myhrvold first got the idea to photograph snowflakes 15 years ago after meeting Kenneth Libbrecht, a California Institute of Technology professor who happened to be studying the physics of snowflakes. He also tapped into his experience as a photographer, most notably as the founder of Modernist Cuisine, a food innovation lab known for its high-resolution photographs of various food stuffs published into a five-volume book of photography of the same name that focuses on the art and science of cooking. Myhrvold, who holds a PhD in theoretical mathematics and physics from Princeton University and served as the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft for 14 years, leaned on his background as a scientist to create the camera. Now, nearly two years in the making, Myhrvold has developed what he bills as the “highest-resolution snowflake camera in the world.” Recently, he released a series of images taken using his creation, a prototype that captures snowflakes at a microscopic level never seen before. The colder the weather, the better his chances are of capturing a microscopic photograph of a snowflake. The first chill of a winter storm is enough to send most people indoors, but not Nathan Myhrvold.
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