Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

Inbetweenies in the early morning.

After an uncannily warm December and January, February in west Michigan is slated to go down in the record books as the coldest second month ever. That’s been good for lake effect snow, and good for snow crystal photography.

Early this morning – 1:30 to be precise – I was wrapping up some business on the PC and chanced to look out the window. Heavy snow was falling – a quick check of the weather map showed several bands of lake effect snow working their way over the area. So despite the early (or more accurately late) hour I headed out to capture a few new snow crystal shots.

So, I’m back to wondering about ending again. Just like with the dragonflies last fall – where with each new subject I wondered if it would be the last – now I find myself wondering the same thing about snow crystals. Once the warm air come this week, with that be it?

Like I said before, beginnings are easy to spot, it’s the endings that sneak up on you.

So I spent a couple of hours this morning in the garage, snapping away at snow crystals. The BBC was on the radio, and after 2 am the program shifted from the news to a discussion of African pop music. The lively tropical music was just the thing to offset the cold dark morning winter night – I imagined that the snow flakes were the notes of the music dancing and swirling around in the sky.

Suddenly I find Ian Drury’s “Inbetweenies” – wow, been a long time since I thought about Ian Drury and the Blockheads.

A lot of photography is about being there where the shot is available to be taken. And a lot of ‘being there’ is being willing to step out into the cold, the dark, the distant corner that takes a while to get to and your never sure what you’ll see when you arrive…

And maybe willing to get up with just a couple of hours of sleep, and slog through the day (even a Sunday – never got around to that nap I planned.) Well, makes for rambling blog entires.

Eight o’clock in the morning, and I’m standing outside in brilliant sunshine. It’s past dawn – the sun is now up in full force, and the growing morning light reflects off the two feet of snow on the ground is dazzling bright. Overhead is a cloudless azure sky – deep, clear, and blue. And in the frosty single-digit chill – snow crystals are slowly falling from the sky.

Without a cloud in sight, just where they are coming from is a bit of a mystery. The howling winds of the snow storm from earlier in the week have long died down, and this morning is still and quiet, with only the screech of a blue jay or two punctuating the morning snow.

Well, no matter where they come from, time is running out and soon the snow, and the chance for snow flake photography, will be over for another year. So I setup the camera in the garage, and get to work.

The slow descent of the crystals makes for ideal shooting. They come down steadily, just one at a time. Enough falling that it takes just a minute or so to gather a good sampling on the glass plate, but not so heavily that they are piling up on top of each other. Best yet, the snow crystals are generally fairly large – about1/8 of an inch in size – and are well formed. After getting a few feet of sleety powdery snow that fell like sand from the sky, it’s a real treat to see good, well formed individual crystals.

Consistent with the rest of the season, today was again bountiful with many 12 pointed crystals. A few were exceptionally complicated, and stirred hopes that just maybe an 18 pointed crystal might emerge.

No luck there – but given how rare 12 pointed snowflakes have been in past seasons, I’m just delights to see so many of them this winter.

My basic setup for shooting the crystals has changed very little this year. I made some modest changes to the light setup, moving the color filter to one side of the coffee can I use to hold the snowflakes and reflect the light back up into them. This year, I can make modest changes to the lighting just by rotating the can a few degrees of arc. I still can’t predict how moving the can will change the lighting – so in effect, I’m still working without understanding – but it’s starting to get clearer.

In the meantime, I’ve also started playing around with some variations in Photoshop, mostly adjusting the hue and color temperature. I’m getting a little tired of the plan old blue snow crystals.

The last crystal shown here reflects the most drastic degree of manipulation. Not only did I adjust the hue, color temperature, and contrast Adobe Camera RAW, but the inverted the image, and made further adjustments to the tiff once it was opened. I kind of like the effect (you can see the un-altered version here.)

More snow is predicted tomorrow – and then the warm up starts. A handful of today’s photos are finally up to par with the best shots of past seasons, so I feel like I can breath easy and feel that this winter hasn’t been wasted – well, at least in regards to snow crystals.

More photos:

Winter is upon us, and the means less time just hanging out in the warm outdoors, and more time inside – “nesting,” “hibernating.” Or just plain going stir crazy.

Since I love macro photography so much, spring through summer days are always productive. Want to take a photo? Just step outside and snap the nearest ant, or fly, or seedling or flower… I often think that in terms of macro shots, the smallest natural area offers thousands of possibilities.

Man made environment offer fewer options. Having an old house helps, but ultimately everything crafted by humans is ridiculously simple compared to nature’s handiwork.

But still, on a cold winter day, with dull light and sloppy weather out of doors, the occasional image flickers up in the house, and something mundane and taken for granted can suddenly seem interesting and engaging.

So it is with a couple of “Around the House” shots shown here.

The first is the multiple shadows of an iron tassel that hangs from a light fixture in the front hall. My house is about 80 years old, and retains most of its original fixtures – as well as the original knob and tube wiring. When I say “iron tassel” I mean a bit of iron, molded to look like a tassel made or cords. It hangs from the bottom of a a light fixture, which is more or less a rhombicuboctahedron in shape (the top and bottom are pointed so it is not quite a true rhombicuboctahedron.)

Well, big words aside, I liked the way the iron molding of a tassel reflected on the plaster wall. A multi-light fixture in the dining room was casting multiple shadows of the tassel, and while they were quite faint on the wall, they were engaging. I wound up scavenging a wooden flagpole (the kind you use to hang a flag next to your front door) to push the light fixture out a bit – in part to get the shadows onto a patch of wall with even lighting, but also to play with the placement of the various shadows created by the individual light bulbs.

Finally, I had to get a small step ladder, since my poking and prodding of the light fixture resulted in the shadows being case about 8 feet above the floor. But with a step or two up, I was able to snap the shot, using the Pentax K10D, ISO 400, shake reduction on.

Like I said, the shadows were quite faint, so I pulled the shot into PhotoShop, boosted the contrast and deepened the shadows. I then converted it to a tritone, and custom toned it using the individual curves tools that are available in this mode. Convert back to RGB color, and the final image is ready.

I'm tempted to name this shot after a line from an Eno and Byrne track in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. "We will appear to you, from time to time..." Hmmmm - I've used that line before, but from time to time, it seems to apply...

The ice crystals was a much simpler shot to take. These formed on the storm window on one of the windows in the living room. Unlike the beautiful and dense florets that window ice usually forms, the ice on this window chose to become a haphazard dashing of random vectors.

The direct sunlight was making the ice lines pop, so photographing them was a simple matter of standing on a chair to get even with the ice. The background of the shot largely determined the framing, since I had to frame the ice in a way to not show my neighbors’ window. (Their house is only about 20 feet away.)

Shooting through window glass – a quarter inch thick and 80 years old – took a bit out of the sharpness, but there is something about the random and chaotic lines that is compelling. I found myself thinking of Jad Fair’s “Headless Horseman” song for the first time in years.

Winter arrived with a vengeance at the end of January, and the unusually mild weather was swept away in a white blur of blowing snow. Unfortunately, the snow has not been suitable for snowflake photography – it has come down as a fine powder, broken up with no distinct crystal structures of any kind.

But it has snowed. In fact, it has snowed a lot. Last weekend as the cold front rolled in the lake effect engine turned on. A few feet of snow have fallen on Kalamazoo, much more has fallen along the lake-shore.

So, instead of photographing snow crystals I decided to go for landscapes showing the whiteout conditions – snowcapes, if you will.

The snow first arrived late in the day on Saturday, January 27. I taught a winter photography workshop at the Pierce Cedar Creek Institute that day. We already had a few inches of snow on the ground, but the serious cold front was just starting to move in, and the heavy white out snow conditions just got started that day. While driving home after the class, I stopped at Walled Lake to snap a few shots of the whiteout conditions using the Pentax K10D.

Heavy snow was the rule for the ensuing week, and on Friday I headed out to the Allegan Forest, just to keep in touch with some of my favorite places.

Allegan is much closer to the lake than Kalamazoo, and the forest was covered with several feet of snow. The snow was too deep for me to venture down any of the two-tracks in my Subaru, so I pulled over onto the shoulder in a few places and hiked back into the woods in the deep snow.

I visited a field that is one of my staples in the summer – north of the Kalamazoo river, it’s a great place for butterflies, dragonflies, and other insects. The winter shot certainly contrasts with the hot, hazy photo I took of the same scene last summer.

Yesterday (Feb 9, 2007) I decided to head out to South haven to see what the lighthouse looked like in the snow.

I have to admit – I've cooled to lighthouse photography. I make only a few trips a year out to the lakeshore, where in the past I regularly went hit the nearby lighthouses, from St. Joseph up to Grand Haven.

Early in the week, the temperatures were downright frigid – with a –10 Fahrenheit (that’s -23 Celsius for everyone outside of the US). By Friday the temperatures have moderated, to a relatively balmy 18 (-8 C). I went to the lighthouse mostly because I couldn't think of a better place to go.

It wasn't snowing in Kalamazoo, but as I got to the lake shore (30 miles away) the snow was heavy. I walked out onto the pier to get close to the lighthouse – walking on glare ice covered with 5 inches of light and fluffy snow. The water just at the point of freezing up solidly, lots of broken slabs of ice with little spaces of open water between them.  

The shot of the South Haven Lighthouse works well enough – I would have preferred to be a yard or two to the right of where I shot it, but that would have put me right at the edge of the pier, and too close to the water for comfort.

Tonight is clear, with temps already back into the single digits. Maybe we’ll get some snow yet that will be good for snow flake photos. But, if not, maybe there will be a few more chances for snowscapes.