Customer Reviews

Snowflakes in Photographs (Dover Pictorial Archive)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
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"Snowflakes in Photographs" is a beautiful book with some history on Bentley and his photography; featuring stunning black and white photographs of snowflakes. Ironically however, the book "Snow Crystals" (also published by Dover) contains a great deal more text and more than twice the number of photographs than this book "Snowflakes in Photographs". I bought the two books at the same time thinking that other one focused more on Bentley and this one focused more on the pictures but it was a mistake. This is a case of "you get what you pay for" and the only reason to buy this one is that it is a bit cheaper than the other. On it's own, this book is still a smaller but nice collection of photographs without much 'text' support.

This is basically a 72 page book with b/w photos of snowflakes. With 12 crystals on each page it has quite a varied collection of snowflakes.It is not a coffee table book - but a great reference book.

This book about lived up to my expectations -- which wouldn't make it worth it for everybody. In our case, we were doing a unit study on snowflakes and we covered Bentley's biography (from children's picture books for the young ones to more complete adult biographies for the older) and the point of this book for us was simply to see what it was that he did. I explained to my first grader that the large camera he had was also very young in terms of the history of photography and that what he accomplished was marvelous for his time. I also explained that today's equipment is able to do so much more. We turned to Libbrecht'sThe Snowflake-- being from Caltech he's probably a good one to take up the cause and the photos are incredible. My first grader loved them so much that we ended up getting the calendar, Snowflakes 2008 Calendar: Featuring the amazing micro-photography of Kenneth Libbrecht (Calendar). The high school student was more interested in the text, and I loved both.

Since I was familiar with Bentley's photos I knew I was buying this one for historical interest to go along with the biographies and not for anything more -- therefore, I didn't experience any disappointment for it perhaps not being as good as other books mentioned.

I bought this book hoping the kids (8&5) would be intrigued by all the patterns of the snowflakes. They weren't, but the adults loved it!

The photography and the story of the how these snowflakes were captured on film is very interesting.

Bentley photographed the ephemeral and hidden: snowflakes. He did this on his own with limited education and equipment. His glass plates remind us of the awe, beauty and wonder of frozen water. The book reveals Bentley's efforts on his Vermont farm over his lifetime. His dedication and creativity help us grasp the complexity, simplicity and three-dimensional images of snow. Snow is the most unstable substance on earth - always changing, even while it is forming in the atmosphere, falling through the atmosphere, depositing on a ground surface (water, soil, fence, glass, trees), sublimating (going directly from a solid to a vapor), hoar frost depositing out of a saturated clear atmosphere at night to produce a fairly land in at sunrise, going through continuous metamorphism (melt-freeze, temperature gradient, equitemperature gradient) and finally melting to return to the liquid form of the hydrologic cycle.

Bentley's photographs enable us all to grasp snow from nursery to graduate school - the images all make sense - physically and mentally. Many images have been transformed into ornaments, framed photographs and other high end works of art.

The wonderful thing about this book is that Snowflake Bentley actually took these photos. It is a "must have" companion to the book named after him.

A recent publication, "Snowflake Bentley," is for Dads to read to the picture-book crowd. I bought this vintage publication for my son's information when he's reading the picture book to his daughter. She can cut up this book of beautiful snowflake photographs for some craft work.

This amazing collection of black and white photographs of actual snowflakes has been a great source of inspiration for me. Very educational. Any one wanting to get the plain truth of real snowflakes should have this book. It is not gussied up with color and tricks of light found in the beautiful "coffee table" books also available. This is a plain black and white marvel.

I ran across a book of "Snowflake Bentley" snowflakes many years ago. Imagine staying outside in the cold, taking picture of freshly fallen snowflakes, making sure that each tiny flake doesn't get destroyed while having it's picture taken, and with an old- fashioned camera. I was so impressed, then, and was thrilled to see it offered on Amazon these many years later. It is always there for me to look at, front and center, in my little library.

Snowflakes in Photographs proves that each snowflake is an original. The probability of being wrong is less than 0.0002, a standard respected by scientists worldwide.