For decades, Elizabeth Root Blackmer has used macro lenses to capture breathtaking images of water droplets, spiderwebs, and skeins of ice.

For her latest series, Blackmer decided to shoot macro images of the frost crystals that form inside the storm windows of her Maine farmhouse.

The conditions have to be just right for the crystals to form—the window surface can be neither too warm or too cold, and the air must contain enough moisture.

Sometimes the windows freeze too quickly, creating a coat of white frost without any distinctive patterns.

When everything turns out right, the frost looks like delicate, gossamer-thin crystals carved out of glass.

Blackmer enhances the photos’ natural colors in Photoshop to make them even more intense.

Blackmer photographs most of the frost crystals at dawn, illuminated by the sun’s pale golden light, before they begin to thaw and disappear.

Each of the images represents an approximately one-inch-square section of the window.

Blackmer studied fine arts at Harvard under renowned experimental photographer Len Gittleman, who helped inspire a love for abstract and ambiguous images.

“They draw you in if there’s a bit of mystery in them,” Blackmer says about her images. “Sometimes you recognize the image, sometimes you don’t.”

Although the objects she photographs are small, Blackmer invests them with an almost mystical significance.

“There are these patterns that exist throughout nature on all different scales,” Blackmer says.

“You don’t necessarily know what scale you’re looking at,” Blackmer says. “It could be taken from an airplane, or it could be an inch across.”

Like the water droplets she photographs, Blackmer’s frost crystals are defined by their ephemerality. “Sometimes they’re gone within seconds,” she says.

Blackmer sees her photography as a way of fixing these transient objects in time. “Some of them would never be seen by another person if I didn’t take a picture of them,” she says.