There is no denying that snowflakes are small, with most measuring just a few millimeters in size. To get such a crisp shot of something so minuscule, Nathan needed a crystal-clear lens. He decided to make one out of something normally found in high-end watches: artificial sapphire. Artificial sapphire is incredibly hard and almost impossible to scratch. Nathan chilled the artificial sapphire slides to ambient temperature or colder so that the ice crystals wouldn’t melt upon contact. He also developed an optical path to fill a medium-format digital back, allowing him to obtain a larger, sharper image than most microscopic photographs. Along with the optical path, Nathan focus-stacked images to get a depth and clarity on a large scale not normally associated with micro or macro photos.

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