Come late July I start looking for mushrooms, but this year they were thin on the ground. Even in woods that usually have a ton barely had any. I went out and looked and looked, but came away with very few photos. This is it for August –
Found this little beauty in the yard on a log, not sure what it is, but I couldn’t pass it by. The LED panel really brought up that texture nicely.
Oh and what looks like an Amanita in the Destroying Angels family of death merchants. I saw it on my way down part of the Ice Age Trail, but like all segments, it’s an out and back and luckily for me the light was much better on my second pass. As you know by now, I love dappled sunlight on the forest floor and this is no exception –
Next is a lobster mushroom. Yes they really are called that. Partly because they sometimes turn a deeper red color than this, but partly because they are pretty choice edibles. Some say they taste like the seafood, but I didn’t get that so much as a savory and somewhat umami flavor when I’ve had them. I’ve seen them many times, but this is the first time I photographed one. Again, it was because of the light. This is a natural shaft of sun that just lit it so nicely that I had to try some stacking.
Lobsters are peculiar mushrooms because they only form when two species of fungi come together. The scientific name for these is Hypomyces lactifluorum, and it’s not technically a mushroom which is the fruiting body of a fungus. These are neither, but occur when parasitic ascomycete fungus grows on the fruiting body of another fungi, usually Lactarius or Russula species. The chemical make up as well as the very DNA of the host mushroom is completely changed and taken over with little remaining to tell what the host actually was. I believe the white dusting in the picture is the Hypomyces lactiflorum –
And a little Hemlock varnish shelf, this one quite dusty and small, but again, the light drew me and I got the tripod down before the earth turned too much.
Back in the yard for these next two. I believe they are Mica caps (Coprinellus micaceus) and are in a family of mushrooms called Inky caps and they turn inside out and curly like this sometimes. Other times the caps themselves disintegrate and resemble pools of dripping ink.
That’s it. 8 pictures. 9 if you count this lone, early September beauty –
I think these are old Turkey tails, but I’m not really sure. Some kind of Polypore anyway. Who could resist them and their colorful backdrop?
That one up there, lovely though it be, is a bit of a cheat since shelf fungi like those are perpetual, adding layers like tree rings every year. But the ones below are truly there and gone. Once the spores are scattered, the fruit deteriorates and dies. While they are there though…
This next one was a lot of work to get finished and I’m still not 100% happy with it, but it is what it is and maybe next time I can do better. Still, it’s a fine looking bunch of honeys and I had a funny thing happen while the camera was going through the photos in the bracketing session. I put a leaf up behind and against another mushroom that was too close and would have been distracting. Around the 6th shot it fell down. I quickly put it back. And in three shots or so it fell down again.
Gah! Stupid wind. But I got it back into place. Back when I first started focus stacking I thought that would ruin my stack, but now I know better. Since I ended up with so many individual shots a few with, uh, problems, wouldn’t be permanent. As a matter of fact with a little tweaking in Zerene when setting the contrast threshold for the DMap stack, you couldn’t even see my hand in the frame. And not getting the leaf exactly into the same spot didn’t matter either. See!
Not sure what these guys are exactly (according to one person on iNaturalist, they might be False chanterelles), but I liked how bright they are and the bit of teaberry leaf that sets them off. I haven’t done any serious microscape work in a while, but this one qualifies.
These next three I photographed right here in the yard and I think they are all the same species – Galerina marginata – aka Funeral bells, Autumn skullcaps or Deadly skullcaps. As you might have already figured out, they’re extremely poisonous and will kill you dead. Don’t let their cute appearance and diminutive size fool you. Look, but don’t lick.
They are decomposers and help to break down wood so all of these are on stumps or logs.
I think this next one is a type of Mycena, but I’m not really sure. Many of these little guys look so similar that I don’t think even mycologists can tell them apart without a microscope.
Phew! You made it to the end. Hope you liked what turned out to be a longer post than I thought it would be. Of course there are some shots that didn’t make it, so if you hunger for more mushrooms, head on over to my Gallery here.
Your work is really beautiful here. Photo stacking is amazing for detail. I think. I have used Zerene in the past (looked at my records and I got it in 2012!) and liked it. How do you do your photo stacking – bellows, or a tripod and just shift your focus point a bit, like I did.
Awww, thanks. I like to think I’m improving my technique every time I go out. I’d never done stacking while using a manual macro lens since it was too time consuming and could leave gaps in the focus plane that don’t happen with auto bracketing in camera. That’s how I do it – I use the focus bracketing function in the G9 which steps the lens through a set number of shots at a set distance one to the next. If I select an area just ahead of the subject I want to show, the camera will refocus the lens there and then subsequently behind and farther back into the scene. The G9 can take up to 999 photos in a session, but I only go to a few dozen most of the time. If you search for stacking here you’ll find a couple of posts I wrote about field technique and processing for stacking. I might have to update those since I’ve learned a few things since then.
Thanks for the info, Kris! I had a Nikon D70 or D7000 at the time and was still learning. I used an old manual focus Elicar – still a favorite lens – which was a 50mm and macro. Maybe I will set something up with my Z6ii and see what I can get. I don’t know if I have a macro lens for that one, but do have in other Nikon mounts, so with the Z-to-F-mount adapter, that may be possible. I like this idea – maybe a macro of a poinsettia or something. BTW, did you ever try the Brenizer Method for narrow DOF in landscape photography? It is really cool!