A 130-year-old tradition of snowflake photography continues in Jericho, Vermont

Ryan Mercer | Burlington Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption WATCH: Stunning photos of snowflakes echo Wilson 'Snowflake' Bentley Stuart Hall has been quietly photographing snowflakes at his home, less than a mile from where Wilson 'Snowflake' Bentley made history in 1885.

What it is about Jericho, Vermont, and snowflake photographers?

In 1885, Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley photographed the first snowflake ever at his home in the town within eyeshot of Vermont's highest peak, Mount Mansfield. More than a century later, Stuart Hall, who lives just a mile away from where Bentley made history, got curious and started photographing them. In 2012, Caleb Foster moved to town. He's been photographing snowflakes too.

What cosmic force is at work here? It could just the weather.

It seems that Jericho is a prime spot for observing ice dendrites — the type of snow crystal formation with that classic snowflake shape — because of the town's location just west of the Green Mountains, according to National Weather Service Meteorologist Peter Banacos in Burlington.

Winter storms run up the mountainsides, producing upslope snowfall that's perfect for creating light, fluffy, dry snow crystals, especially towards the end of a snow storm when the last bits of moisture are being wrung out of the air.

Who knows. If Bentley had lived in the lower-lying City of Burlington, the frustration of trying to pull apart wet snow flakes more common in the valleys near Lake Champlain — and damaging them in the process — might have made him give up the whole of idea of photographing them in the first place.

And then, maybe Stuart Hall wouldn't have picked up the hobby either, who was first inspired after seeing Bentley's pioneering work. As for Foster, that's still a mystery. He claims he had no idea who Snowflake Bentley was before deciding to move to Jericho.

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Modern Day Bentleys

Hall has been photographing snowflakes in his shed about a mile down the road from Bentley's home for the past 12 years. He became interested after after driving by Bentley's home, which still bears the snowflake-shaped lattice on the outside of the house.

And at first glance, it's hard to tell the two photographer's work apart.

More: Snowflake Bentley's doppelgänger has shown up in Jericho, 130 years later

Hall's methods, employing technology more than a century advanced compared to Bentley, are still fairly similar to what Bentley was doing and are straight forward compared to Foster, who uses a microscope and a complex a lighting system. Nevertheless, Hall's work shows detail in each snow crystal he shoots and invokes the spirit of Bentley's work.

Hall's catalogue is massive compared to Bentley's and Foster's. He estimates that he has photographed more than 27,000 snowflakes since he started in 2007. That's more than double the number Bentley and Foster, to date, photographed combined. Despite that, he said less than 500 have made the cut for printing and of those, he considers just five to be truly exceptional.

In those numbers lies a warning: Even with today's technology, photographing snowflakes is still hard, tedious, painstaking work.

How does he capture snowflakes? Details for the photographers among us

If you met Hall, whose family roots in Vermont go back to before the Revolutionary War, he said, you might describe him as a fairly reserved person. But when he opens up his shed and starts describing his homemade set up — as unique as the snowflakes he photographs — he can't help but smile a little.

Just like Bentley, Hall fashioned most of the tools he uses himself.

For starters, Hall invented his own macro lens system instead of using a microscope. By facing two lenses together and connecting them via a piece of copper sheet metal with a soldered filter ring at each end.

The idea builds on an old do-it-yourself hack employed by photographers who wanted a macro lens solution without the macro lens. By taking the lens off a SLR camera — often a 50 mm or something close — turning it around and literally holding it onto the body of the camera, a photographer could get extreme magnification. It's a crude but effective way to take a macro photo when lacking a true macro lens.

But Hall engineered it to be precise.

His lighting solution is simple, but equally effective. He uses a Nikon D800 digital camera and its pop-up flash for lighting, but the camera sits inside a cylinder lined with aluminum foil. That bounces the flash all around, bathing a snowflake in light and revealing intricate details in each crystal he photographs.

More: Check out more of Stuart Hall's photography

Even with all that, the hardest trick is still in collecting a snowflake that is undamaged, lands nice and flat on his black felt board, and getting it under the camera before it either melts or evaporates. Both Hall and Foster describe flakes disapearing into the air, a process called sublimation when ice skips the liquid state and changes straight into a gas.

Hall, who was inspired by Bentley's historic work, thinks of what he had to go through to photograph snowflakes in 1885 and just shakes his head.

"I can't imagine," Hall said. "For [Bentley] to do what he did... it's just amazing."

Contact Ryan Mercer at rmercer@freepressmedia.com or at 802-343-4169. Follow him on Twitter @ryanmercer1 and facebook.com/ryan.mercer1.