At his home in Aurora, Jason Persoff peers out the window of his back porch overlooking a field and a small pond. “I always love it when there's fresh fallen snow,” he said.
December finally delivered weather that was cold and moist enough to deposit a dusting on the porch railing.
He opens a sliding glass door. In his hand, he has a camera with a long lens. “The secret of my operation is here,” Persoff said, with a grin.
On a table, there’s an LED light and a fluffy black sock. Against that unusual backdrop, snowflakes pop.
He carefully maneuvers the tiny frozen structures with a toothpick. The camera shutter registers each image.
Click, click, click.
“You can see they're incredibly fragile. They're microscopic glass, essentially. And actually, glass would be even more solid than these snowflakes,” Persoff said, rattling off dozens of images, in quick succession.
Click, click, click.
So, I cover the health beat — why am I telling you about pictures of snowflakes? Let me take you back a few years to early 2020.
The pandemic hits, with the governor announcing Colorado’s first case. Soon news coverage tells of fresh cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
I was scrambling to explain how the virus was affecting Coloradans. By phone or Zoom, I talked to a lot of people, including doctors in hospitals.
One source was Dr. Persoff, a hospitalist at the UCHealth University of Colorado hospital. He helped it manage emergency preparedness, dealing with things like PPE and staffing.
As the crisis grew and evolved, Persoff helped explain the trends, including when the early surge eased and Colorado could breathe an initial sigh of relief.
I started following him on Facebook, where he posted about his passion — not related to medicine or health — but photography of weather and snowflakes.
He manages to capture unreal images of bright, intricate crystals on a black background.
At his kitchen table, Persoff, looking out over his eyeglasses, shows snowflake photos captured over the years.
“It looks like this thing was handcrafted, which is what's spectacular. And this is what's possible when it gets cold enough to get these incredible snowflakes,” Persoff said.
Some have broad arms, others delicate branches. Some have bubbles, others look like flowers. “And all snowflakes because of the way that water crystallizes will end up being hexagonal. Always.”
Each is maybe 2 millimeters in width, each with its own ethereal design, due to the way changing weather shapes it. “It would be almost impossible to have two snowflakes that are alike because of that. Even across the snowflake, there's no symmetry.”
Like people? I ask.
“Like people. Most people are asymmetric!” he said with a hearty laugh.
And one of a kind!
As we chat, his cats wander around, occasionally jumping in his lap. Their names are, of course, science-related: Thunder, Helix and Meso, short for mesocyclone. (If you didn’t know, that’s a column of air quickly rotating air that forms in a thunderstorm, often a precursor to a real tornado. I had to look it up.)
Above a living room mantle, he’s hung a series of enlarged snowflake images. On other walls, there are big prints of tornadoes and spectacular cloud formations.
In warmer months, he chases storms, taking photos and videos as he roams the plains. A video he shared with me captures the moment a twister forms on the horizon. “Look at that thing!” he shouts, with someone nearby cheering. “Woo hoo!”
“The thing that I really love about weather from a photographic standpoint is trying to capture the wonder that I feel sitting in the face of either storms or snowflakes about how just amazing the world is,” Persoff said.
News outlets, like the Washington Post, have reported on his photos. He has a website, where folks can see and buy them and posts instructional videos on YouTube. But for Persoff, the joy comes in a spiritual connection to the natural world.
“It’s a place where I get to experience true serenity,” said Persoff.
It’s a respite from working in a hospital, which he loves, but where it can be hectic and stressful.
“Every now and again, I need to be reminded that the world is very broad and beautiful, and especially during wintertime,” Persoff said.
That's one of the things the snowflakes give him.
