The winter season is in full bloom here in the Canadian Rockies with a gentle fall of snow flurries. Such a sentence seems like a contradiction as "blooming" engenders thoughts of flowers, and winter is not a season for flowers. For me, however, there blooms another entity in winter and that is the snowflake. And what would winter be without the appearance of these stunning and complex blooms of ice? As much as the coming of winter brings the falling snow, so too has it brought another product of the season: a stunning new book from the cameras of Kenneth Libbrecht entitled simply: Snowflakes.
Last year when Voyageur Press released Libbrecht's book The Art of the Snowflake: A Photographic Album, I wrote. "This Wow! book straddles the worlds of art and science and should be on the shelves of everyone even remotely interested in the beauty of nature and of weather." I cannot improve on those words to describe Libbrecht's latest book, it is a visual buffet of snowflake photographs well-seasoned with relevant quotes. Another Wow! book from Libbrecht.
If I were to title these reviews beyond the obvious, or perhaps provide a subtitle, this piece would be called "The Little Book of Snowflakes grows up." Snowflakes and Little Book are quite alike in content and physical dimension, both are dominated by color photographs of snowflakes (crystals) with a selection of appropriate quotes about snow, winter and nature. The growing up part is that Snowflakes contains a whopping 512 pages of which at least 450 are snowflake photographs, compared to Little Book's 96 pages and 148 photographs. (Even better, the price has not grown in a similar proportion.)
To say the least, I am a major fan of Ken Libbrecht's work and his books have provided hours of entertainment for me and my friends. Snowflakes is a welcome addition to the Libbrecht shelf in my library. And so it should be to yours.
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I have recently added many of my lifetime collection of photographs and art works to an on-line shop where you can purchase notecards, posters, and greeting cards, etc. of my best images.
