Not in the spaced-out sense – in the beautiful, mystical sense! 🍄
Not long after I first picked up a DSLR, I started photographing toadstools and mushrooms, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I find these little fungi amazing, they just pop up seemingly overnight from the damp dirt and rotting leaves, and if you look closely, they’re such pretty little things, like tiny fairy umbrellas!
Autumn mornings are my favourite time to go hunting for them – the light is often perfect and the colours are glorious. There’s nothing I love more than a few happy hours lying on the woodland floor with my camera…
I deliberately leave some images soft and out of focus to add to the mysterious feel. This one worked especially well in black and white for the mood I was after…
Some are absolutely tiny, less than 5mm across, with thin, glassy little stalks…
I found one little bunch of three that I fell in love with, and got several slightly different shots as the light shifted, as I moved around, or as I rearranged the wet leaves behind to avoid reflections…
The smallest ones are my favourites. It’s amazing how they push up through the leaves on such delicate stalks. I imagine these wee bendy ones had quite a journey to get up…
And I’ve captured quite a variety over the years…
Including this one being munched by a slug!
Why I still crouch in the mud
That habit of getting down low and noticing the tiny details is something I bring to every brand shoot – it’s how I end up spotting a bee on the apple blossom or the little textures that tell a business’s story.
Want to see just how tiny some of these were? Check out this post showing what you see vs what I see with my macro lens!
