United States
£ GBP
The Snowflake: Winter's Frozen Artistry is filled with a blizzard of breathtaking, close-up, highly detailed photographs of snow crystals. The book is written in a lighthearted, popular-science tone and focuses on what snowflakes are, how they form in clouds, why they have sixfold symmetry, why they have facets and branches, and the many different types of snowflakes.
A decade's worth of photography from northern Ontario, Vermont, Alaska, Michigan, northern Sweden, and Japan, including more beautiful crystals, advanced photographic techniques, high-resolution images, numerous examples of crystal types, and a wide variety of illumination methods make for a visually stunning work of frozen art.
Authors Kenneth N. Libbrecht and Rachel Wing provide fascinating material on snowflake photography, winter clouds and snowflakes, ice halos, skiing, snowballs, artificial snow, avalanches, and frost formations. No one who has ever caught snowflakes on their tongue or simply marveled at a winter wonderland will want to miss it!
Kenneth Libbrecht is a professor of physics at Caltech, where he studies the molecular dynamics of crystal growth, especially how ice crystals grow from water vapor, which is essentially the physics of snowflakes. He has authored several books on this topic, including The Snowflake: Winter's Secret Beauty, The Art of the Snowflake, and Ken Libbrecht's Field Guide to Snowflakes. He lives in Pasadena with his wife, Rachel Wing. They have two children.
Rachel Wing is a park ranger for the city of Monrovia, California, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. With a background in geology, she now specializes in balancing wilderness preservation with wildfire safety for nearby residents. Rachel loves to hike and climb in these hills, especially on the rare occasions when snow graces our desert-like plants. She has been accompanying Ken Libbrecht as a snowflake chaser for nearly 20 years.
