Autumn Magic – Mushrooms in the Woods

With the change in season, Autumn brings one of my favorite photography subjects – Fungi. I made myself get out for a Saturday morning to go rumaging through the forest to photograph whatever fungi I could find.

Its been ages since i’ve had time to go out with the camera – mainly due to 2 broken lenses! This only left me with a Canon 50mm f1.8 which is a great lens, but not really suited to my normal style of photography.

I recently bought a new second hand lens to use as a short term replacement – but i’ve actually discovered that I really like it. The lens is a Canon EF 28-90mm which gives a very good focal range for this kind of photography.

Because the forest is very dark, I also took my Vivitar 285HV flash with a diy omni flash (see this post – the white box in the photo). I would normally use the small softbox that I made for this purpose…but this has gone missing during a house move – looks like I might have to make a new one. Normally an omni modifier turns the flash into a lightbulb sending out light in all directions – because mine is made as a box that fits over the end of my flash, it is still semi-directional & creates a wide pool of light. A softbox would have made the shadows much softer, the omni has left me with quite harsh, sharp edged shadows.

I also experimented using a small reflector
– but in this case it didn’t really help…I find it much more useful for macro use.

Despite a little rain & gloom, it was a productive couple of hours in the forest – you can see the best of the photographs below. The yellow coral fungi was probably my favorite find of the day – it looks so alien in the forest.