I had thought about heading out today to see about finding a place to try some winter wildlife photography - particularly looking for deer in the snow. However, it was just far too cold try do that, so I thought about what I could shoot around here.

I still headed out into the cold, but this time with the MP-E 65mm to see whether I could get any super macro shots of some snowflakes. I'd seen something somewhere (I can't remember where) of photos of individual snowflakes, so I figured I would see if I could do the same.

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro, 1, 10, 3.2 sec respectively at f/16. ISO 400. RAW processing in Adobe Camera Raw.

First - finding individual snowflakes is much more difficult than you would think. Any time I would try and look where there was any noticeable amount of snow, it was nearly impossible to distinguish individual flakes. I ended up figuring out that I could find some on the windows of Anya's truck. Even there, I only managed to find maybe half a dozen at a time. And if that wasn't enough of a challenge, I could literally watch the flakes melt in front of me once I did find them.

When I started, I was using my MT-24EX dual macro flash, but I found it was causing far too much in terms of reflections, so I turned it off and went to long exposure times. As you can see, the longest of which went all the way up to 10 seconds.

All of these shots were done at 5x magnification, so dealing with focus was extremely challenging. Anya bought me a macro focusing rail for my birthday, which greatly helped, but at 5x magnification, the slightest movement makes a huge difference in the focus.

This is definitely another subject I'll have to try again in the future - it is just so cool to see such an intricate and unique subject at such magnifications.

- Bill