H2O

I haven't felt like taking pictures lately, but this morning at 4 am when I got up, I turned on the light outside the patio door and saw the hexagonal reflections of some very large snowflakes that had accumulated on the deck railing. So I got the camera out and took a few dozen pictures with my Tamron 90mm macro using a LED ring light I bought back in July but never used before. This is a very radical crop; about 1:4 of an image that was originally about 1:2; of a focus stack of about four images in Zerene. ISO 1250, f/8, 1/200, Pentax K-5.

I'm a chemist, and what I personally liked about this was how the hexagonal, planar crystals illustrate the angular, polar nature of the individual water molecule, something we also see in carbon in the graphite crystal; water and carbon both being essential to life as we know it here on planet Earth. I guess what surprises me is that we don't have six fingers and six toes.