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| Ken Libbrecht's most recent book about snowflakes, The Art of the Snowflake (Voyager Press, $30), showcases more than 200 microscopic pictures of ice crystals in vivid detail (click on cover for a slide show of the book's images). |
Having made more than 7,000 pictures of snowflakes, Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht is in a pretty good position to say each one is unique. "People make a lot more out of that saying than they ought to, you know," he says with a laugh. "I've addressed that on my website, snowcrystals.com, in all it's gory detail, just for the record. And as I like to say, the question of no two snowflakes being alike depends on what you mean by snowflakes and what you mean by alike."
Libbrecht does opine that he has never encountered two identical snow crystals through his microscope. A scientist and a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he took up what he calls "the ice project" in the late 1990s and began making photographs of snow specimens as an avocation. "Since we don't have snow in Pasadena," he says, "I get anxious to go somewhere and look at the snow -- at least once or twice every year." Four of Libbrecht's pictures were selected by the United States Postal Service as designs for stamps in the winter of 2006. And he has published four books of his luminous crystal images, most recently a coffee-table volume called The Art of the Snowflake (Voyageur Press, $30).
In his new book, Libbrecht explains some of the technical aspects of his craft: He travels to very cold locales for specimens and gathers flakes on a black foam-core board, then gently brushes them onto slides. "Once a crystal is under the microscope," he says, "I have anywhere from a few minutes (on colder days) to a few seconds (on warmer days) to adjust the lighting, focus, and take the shot."
Libbrecht readily admits his debt to the original pioneer of snowflake imaging, Wilson Bentley, who photographed snowflakes from 1885 nearly to the time of his death in 1931. "Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty," Bentley wrote, "and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others."
Yet Libbrecht has brought this art form into the digital age, connecting his microscope to a Nikon D1X, shooting richly detailed images, and analyzing the crystals (see slide show for details). "I developed the art a little bit," Libbrecht says. "Bentley got it started -- but it's surprising to think how few people have done it in the last hundred years." We recently spoke with Dr. Libbrecht about his ongoing scientific and photographic passion.
Jack Crager: How can you focus on something like snow and live in Pasadena?
Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht: I like to say it's easier to appreciate snowflakes when you don't have a shovel in your hand. I sort of got into it from the science end. I started to study how crystals grow, and looked at ice as an interesting crystal. And I started reading about it and doing stuff in the lab and I got into the photography. It's sort of funny, living in Southern California, but I figure it's like photographing whales or polar bears or something -- I just go to where they are.
JC: The closest snow to where you live is in the mountains of California?
KL: Yeah, I've done that. I've gone to Sequoia National Park and Tahoe, but the crystals aren't so good there -- it's too warm. Even in Vermont, it' a little too warm on average. The best snowflakes you get at around 5 or 10 degrees -- that's pretty cold. My favorite spots are in Northern Ontario and Alaska.
JC: What does your family say when you make these trips?
KL: A lot of times they go with me. My wife always wants to go with me. Our two kids get a little bored with it [laughs].
JC: As a scientist, you started in solar astronomy, right?
KL: That's right. It was bit of a change. I had been working on studying the oscillation of the sun, it was called helialseismology. And, I don't know, I just felt that we had covered it. It was time for a change. So I looked around and played with a few other things and sort of happened into "the ice project."
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