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At first, Bentley tried drawing snowflakes, but when that didn’t work he turned to photography. Through much trial and error, he finally succeeded by adapting a microscope to a bellows camera, eventually becoming the first person to photograph a single snow crystal in 1885.
He would go on to capture more than 5000 snowflakes during his lifetime, not finding any two alike. His snow crystal photo-micrographs were acquired by colleges and universities throughout the world and he published many articles for magazines and journals including, Scientific American and National Geographic.
Today, original photographs by Bentley are worth several thousand dollars, if you can find one.
In 1931 his book “Snow Crystals,” containing more than 2400 snow crystal images, was published by McGraw-Hill but has long been out of print. A soft cover copy, identical in all respects, can be obtained today from Dover Publications, Inc. On December 23, 1931, Bentley died at the family farmhouse in Jericho.
An AM repost from 2/24/09
4 comments:
Amazing! Hard to believe the complexity & design of nature!
I love this post.
This is beautiful. Thank you so much.
Magnificent. Thank you for introducing me to Snowflake Bentley.
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