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Vintage snow
APERTURE
26 | NewScientist | 4 00February Month 2017 2017
Vintage snow THESE are some of the first ever photographs of individual snowflakes – “tiny miracles of beauty”, as photographer Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley would have it. Born in Vermont in 1865, Bentley was fascinated by snowflakes from an early age. At 15, he tried drawing them as viewed through an old microscope his mother had given him, but they melted before he could finish the intricate details. After years of experimentation, Bentley finally perfected the process of catching snowflakes on a blackboard, transferring them to a microscope slide and capturing them on camera. Armed with this technique, he took the first photograph of a single snowflake in 1885, and amassed more than 5000 images this way over the course of his life. A selection of Bentley’s photos form part of the Sixfold Symmetry exhibition, currently on at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Timothy Revell
Photographer Wilson A. Bentley, Snowflakes, 1905-1931 Photomicrographs, Jack Shear Collection; Tang Museum photographs by Arthur Evans
400 February Month 2017 | NewScientist | 27
26 | NewScientist | 4 00February Month 2017 2017
Vintage snow THESE are some of the first ever photographs of individual snowflakes – “tiny miracles of beauty”, as photographer Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley would have it. Born in Vermont in 1865, Bentley was fascinated by snowflakes from an early age. At 15, he tried drawing them as viewed through an old microscope his mother had given him, but they melted before he could finish the intricate details. After years of experimentation, Bentley finally perfected the process of catching snowflakes on a blackboard, transferring them to a microscope slide and capturing them on camera. Armed with this technique, he took the first photograph of a single snowflake in 1885, and amassed more than 5000 images this way over the course of his life. A selection of Bentley’s photos form part of the Sixfold Symmetry exhibition, currently on at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Timothy Revell
Photographer Wilson A. Bentley, Snowflakes, 1905-1931 Photomicrographs, Jack Shear Collection; Tang Museum photographs by Arthur Evans
400 February Month 2017 | NewScientist | 27