Cold Diamond

A macro photograph of snow on a snow card.

|| Snow is always changing. Snowflakes fall from the sky pointy and perfect, and once on Earth they take on a more practical shape. Temperature, wind, and weight all work to melt, move, form and deform the snowpack. Individual flakes turn into multi-faceted grains; a little round over here and a little square over there. Over time, these grains lock together to form the surface that bears our weight when we take a walk or ski down the mountain. Here’s a small piece of the larger puzzle, an individual grain from the Utah snowpack.

This grain was photographed against a 3mm snow classification grid on a BCA snow card. I used a 100mm 2.8 macro lens, a Canon 580ex in slave mode, and a Canon 7D. ||

Stopper

|| This is a maco view of the caliper and stopper on a full-suspension bike. Formula has been making bomber brakes for years, and with the RX they nailed the benefit to price point. Here’s what your brake rotor looks like up close and personal. ||