On a floor of a balcony I put the turned stool (legs up), on them - a glass plate. Previously, i shoot using Canon A650's standard macro mode. For this, from a small plastic bottle I cut central cylindrical part in the form of a tube (height 5.5 cm). This height I picked up so that the lens of the camera, pushed in a tube, will be at distance 1 centimeter from the bottom (this is minimum focusing distance of Canon A650 in macro mode). I just put this cylinder with the camera's lens within it over the chosen snowflake, the lens looks vertically down.
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Recently, i built simple macro addon for the camera. I used lens Helios 44M-5 from old USSR SLR camera Zenit (here is short description in wikipedia). At first, i attached these lens at narrow wooden board (around 30 cm long), reversed: a back lens to snowflake, front lens to camera, and drilled in a board an opening for a screw suitable to tripod nest of the camera. Then camera is put on a board so that the lens in the maximum optical zoom mode (6x) touched Helios lens and looked straight into them.
http://chaoticmind75.blogspot.ru/2013/08/my-technique-for-snowflakes-shooting.html
