I’ve seen quite a few posts on FB recently of mushroom pictures. Not just snaps of some in a plastic container from the supermarket but some pretty stunning images of wild mushrooms out in the forest / woods with some pretty cool lighting. Some are awesome and they inspired me to go out on a mushroom hunt myself.
There’s a reservoir near where I live and its surrounded by a patch of woods. It had rained quite heavily the day before so I thought I had a good chance of finding some. Now, this is my first outing to capture mushrooms in the wild so I didn’t have any high expectations but I thought I’d see what I can do.
Wandering through the woods I found a few as you can see in the images below. I learned a few lessons here and will take them into my next attempt. I realised beforehand that I would probably need to focus stack when I returned home as I was using my 35mm lens but I made the mistake of thinking that I could handhold the camera whilst shooting. I’m not bothered about getting dirty or messed up whilst out shooting but for most of the shots I was crouching down rather than resting my camera on a solid base. Mistake. A tripod might have been too high as most of them were at ground level (some were on tree trunks so I could have used it then) but I should have found something to rest the camera on and used a cable release / remote trigger.
Another mistake was lighting. Some of the images I’ve seen recently have the inside of the ‘shrooms lit (not sure how that’s done yet) but I could have taken my torch and some coloured gels to create some nice effects and not relied on natural light (lots of shadows in the wood and limited light) or the camera flash (too harsh).
Overall I was disappointed with my efforts but I managed to rescue some. I used Lightroom to post process and focus stacking was done in Photoshop.
