When I saw one of those posable, flexible mini-tripods in a catalog, it immediately occurred to me that this would be the perfect item for taking pictures of tiny flowers and other items on the forest floor for which I have such a hard time bracing the camera.

Such as snowflakes, or, I'm given to understand, more properly snow crystals. —Though it rained all during xmas, we got a brief and beautiful snowstorm, with those big silent fluffly clumps of snow falling; including one crystal that must have been nearly 5mm across. It sat there on my arm, shown off the outer layer of wool—just beautiful. I figured, I ought to see if I could photograph some.

Snow crystal. Image is lightened and cropped. 8400 coolpix. The exif data says it was shot on manual, so it wasn't one of the flash assisted ones.

I tried photographing on a piece of black scrap, laid on the ground, which was rather hard on my knees, plus the camera battery didn't like being cold, even though it was freshly charged. So I plugged in the ac/dc adaptor (and an extension cord) in the studio outlet by the doorwall, and shot pix on our grill, also conveniently black. This picture is the best, though the camera was still cranky about focusing; hence this is all you get: the image is shown full-size.

While not the match of famous snow-crystal photographers, it was still kind of fun. Photo, post 20091226.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.