Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #382015 in Books
• Published on: 1962-06-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 226 pages

Customer Reviews

A classic example of meticulous effort; a beautiful collection
Snow Crystals by Bentley represents the exhilarating beauty and complexity of snowflakes in photographs taken with painstaking effort and enterprise. The book has a very useful introduction, though most of it is devoted to the diverse patterns exhibited by snowflakes. The quest to understand why snowflakes have their delightful shape and symmetry has intrigued the scientists, poets and philosophers for centuries. For example, in sixteenth century, Kepler's essay (On six-cornered snowflake) presents a very illuminating (and perhaps first scientific) account of his thought process on the physics of why snowflake is formed. He discussed several key ideas relevant to packing problems, and on their shapes, and the book by Bentley surely dazzles in being able to present a diverse range of possibilities realized by nature. Highly recommended to science enthusiasts, artists, photographers and atmospheric physicists.

"Snow Crystals" is a blizzard of beauty
In case you are trying to decide between "Snowflakes in Photographs" and "Snow Crystals", both by Bentley and published by Dover, this book is the better deal. Ironically, you get twice as many snowflake photos in "Snow Crystals" than in "Snowflakes in Photographs". Both beautiful books feature stunning black and white photographs of snowflakes but this book definitely has better 'text' support. I bought the two books at the same time thinking that this one focused more on Bentley and the other 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 "Snowflakes in Photographs" over this one is that it is a bit cheaper. Buy "Snow Crystals", it is a blizzard of beauty with gorgeous photographs of snowflakes, nature's fragile crystalline miracles.

Sheer art
This book is a collection of some of W. A. Bentley's finest snowflake photographs. At the beginning of the book is a 20-page introduction to the photography and science of snowflakes (as of 1930). The photographic advice is more of value today as historical documentation about how the pictures were taken- -we no longer use photographic plates or develop and fix our own negatives. The scientific section consists mostly of descriptive and classificatory commentary, with relatively little in the way of explanation as to why the snowflakes take on the shapes that they do. Some of the commentary cites specific plates as examples. The real value of the book is in the plates themselves- -two hundred pages of high-quality black and white photographs, depicting over two thousand differently shaped snowflakes. A reader could spend many hours poring over the magical snowflakes. In looking through the plates, it becomes clear quite quickly that Bentley was a man of genius and dedication.