Fungi - Photography - Mushroom

Every year in the fall you can see growing mushrooms almost everywhere. But what you get to see is only a little part of the fungus. The biggest part is in the ground or in the wood. The part you can see above the ground is just a kind of "fruit". In Europe we have thousands of different species of fungi, many of the very photogenic.

Two Safffrondrop Bonnets photographed on a piece of fallen wood. Photographing mushrooms can be a real joy, cause you have all the time to compose your picture.

And mushrooms don't run away like insects. They stand absolutely still. You have all time to compose the picture and set the light with reflectors or flash. It can be a real fun to photograph fungi.
And even the weather isn't very important when photographing fungi. Wind doesn't matter, cause most mushrooms are stable enough to stand even stronger wind. The light in the forest is almost ever bad, so you have to use an tripod anyway - even when the sun shining. So whenever the weather is too bad for photographing birds or take macro-shots of insects I go out photograhing fungi in the forest.
But there are some difficulties, too, when photograhing mushrooms. It is the small depth of field when photographing little mushrooms with a huge cap. It's almost impossible to take a picture where the cap and the shaft of the mushroom is in focus. You have to use small f-stops to get the maximum depth of field and this often causes disturbed backgrounds in the picture. So one have to carefully find the balance between depth of field and smooth background, or just change your position so that you have an smoother background even if you use smallest f-stops.

And now I wish you much fun while viewing our pictures.