You can make your own detergent and water solution or make stronger bubbles using glycerin or corn syrup. The bubbles will eventually pop, but with a bit of practice you should be able to pick them up and examine them first.
For a first attempt, I’m pretty happy with the results. A frost pattern forms on the bubble surface. Earlier in the day my experiments were thwarted by a light breeze, but that was quickly solved with various cardboard boxes arranged as a shield. Smaller bubbles tended to survive longer. Creating these bubbles is pretty easy, and I found a recipe for stronger bubbles online: 6 parts water 2 parts dish detergent 1 part white corn syrup The corn syrup acts as a thickening agent that makes the bubbles more stable on impact with the snow, but most of them were still breaking on contact. By the time I took a test shot with a flash, the chance to photograph the bubble will likely be over. This bubble is lit using a high-powered LED flashlight which allows me to visualize the proper angle faster than using a regular flash. Shallow focus is an element you need to work around. I could push it slightly further than F/10 which is what I used here, but it wouldn’t make a huge difference at this scale. This means that focus stacking is impossible, and at the scale I was shooting the depth of field is just barely big enough. Even at the fastest rate of speed my camera can fire, the crystals show noticeable signs of growth and/or movement. Frost bubbles have another challenge, in that they are very dynamic subjects. Thankfully, my work with snowflakes has developed the necessary skills to most fast and work handheld, which were put to use in this image. This leaves very little time to get the camera and light in the proper position before the entire bubble freezes into a shell of frost.
This been on my winter to-do list since last year, but I’ve always been so busy with other projects to make an attempt… here’s my first attempt at the subject! This is a difficult subject to photograph, partly due to the difficulty in getting a bubble to not burst on impact with the snow, and partly because it starts to freeze almost immediately. A fun deviation from snowflakes (there will still be one posted today, don’t worry!), I decided to try my hand a fun experiment: photographing soap bubbles as they freeze.
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