the mushrooms are back

Yay!!

It's no secret that last autumn and early winter were really disappointing on the mushroom spotting front.  Compared to over 400 species "collected" in 2022, last year we got fewer than 150.

Anyway, just last week my daughter and I went up to the forest above Ystradfellte in the southern Brecon Beacons hoping to find some fruiting fungi.  We weren't disappointed with a host of mushrooms sprouting from the warm, damp woodland floor.I even managed to see a two new ones for myself, the wonderfully named white cheese polypore (pictured right) and a similar but more colourful blue cheese polypore which you can see below.

After a good old explore I settled on two subjects for serious photographic intervention (i.e. I thought they'd make a nice picture!).  And here they are - that blue cheese one first, and then some cold foot bonnets.

Both images were something of a challenge.  Firstly being deep in the forest light was an issue.  I didn't want to introduce anything artificial for fear of completely blowing out the white parts of the mushrooms.

Secondly, those low light levels meant shooting at quite a wide aperture, and therefore depth of field became an issue.  This meant having to shoot a number of focus-bracketed shots which were later stitched together using Helicon Focus

Lovely stuff.

Fujifilm X-H2, Laowa 65mm f2.8 ultra-macro
1/9th of a second at f4, ISO 125
tripod, self-timed release
8-shot focus bracket, stacked using Helicon Focus

Fujifilm X-H2, Laowa 65mm f2.8 ultra-macro
1/10th of a second at f4, ISO 125
tripod, self-timed release
8-shot focus bracket, stacked using Helicon Focus

Naturally I couldn't let such an exciting outing go by without filming it, and you can view the resulting video just by clicking below: