For photographer Tim Leach, capturing spectacular images of frost crystal takes time, skill and plenty of care.
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So delicate are the ice formations he captured during Canberra's recent heavy frosts, he said even his camera flash could potentially destroy them.
In the early hours of the morning, the Evatt resident has spent up to four hours at a time capturing the frost crystal photographs he entered in The Canberra Times winter photo competition.
His published image Frost Crystals 1 features a water droplet covered with hollow rod frost crystals taken on one of the coldest nights of August, when temperatures dropped to minus five degrees.
"One reason for taking these images is they are all unique, just like snowflakes, no two frost images are alike. They exist for a few hours and are gone forever," he said.
Mr Leach purchased a device called a focus rail, a type of camera mount that allows you to move the camera forwards and backward on a very small scale. Mr Leach used the device to take a series of 40 images which he eventually merged into one.
"It takes me about three hours to process those 40 images and then put them through the stacking program to end up with the whole of the image in focus … as you can see the outcome is quite awesome," he said.
Holt resident, Alex Wickham, is another competition entrant who sought to represent the frost of winter, in her case with an image of her horse, Elle. Her entry, Winter Whiskers, showed the 25-year-old mare with a frost encrusted face playfully nudging the camera.
"This moment was special to me, I was up early checking on the horses and there was a very hard frost, minus six degrees or so. It has to be fairly cold for them to get ice on their face and I had only seen it once before," Ms Wickham said.
Entries to the winter photo competition closed on August 31. Winners of a share of $1000 prizemoney will be announced soon.