SKEPTIC PHOTO: MUSHROOMS

We have had a ton of rain during the second half of August, and it appears that that has inspired a new crop of mushrooms. Today as I started on my morning walk I noticed a couple of mushrooms growing in a mulched area in our subdivision. Mushrooms are ephemeral organisms and I decided I had better get a few photos before things changed over the course of the morning.

I took all of the shots with my Tamron 90 mm macro lens, and even though it was sunny and quite bright, I was using my tripod on nearly all of the shots.

There were actually two primary mushrooms. The first was 4-5 inches across and was accompanied by a "juvenile" companion.

Here is a closeup of just the larger mushroom.

This was at about 6:30 a.m., and the mushrooms must have emerged during the night. The larger specimen was draped in some sort of orange liquid that I chose not to touch. This was actually a pretty good shot technically, at an aperture of f/18 with an exposure of 1/25 second.

Then it was on to the larger specimen. I think these were all the same species, but this one was quite large, at least 8 inches across. Here, first, was a set shot of the whole mushroom. Classic.

What caught my eye were the gills on the mushroom's underside, and I spent most of my "session" attempting to capture them. This was not going to be easy, for a number of reasons. First, the mushroom's underside was only 4-5 inches off the ground, and it was impossible to capture the gills in full without physically taking the mushroom apart, which I did not want to do. What that meant was that I basically had to lie on my stomach and in a public place . . . in my own subdivision. Second, if I wanted to get a closeup, depth of field was going to be an issue. Optically, the closer my lens was to the object, the shallower the depth of field. I didn't mind that part of the image would be out of focus, but I would need to play around with apertures and focal points to see if I could get a shot that I liked.

Here was an early effort that I shot at a wide-open aperture of f/4.5. For this shot the front of my lens was probably only about 3 inches from the leading edge of the mushroom.

This shot did not work. The gills were in good focus, as was a portion of the top of the mushroom that happened to be at the same distance from the lens as the gills. I was OK with the fact that the bulk of the top of the mushroom was badly out of focus, but what I did not like was the fact that the very perimeter was out of focus. I am much more comfortable when a background is out of focus than when the foreground is.

The following shot was much better, with a super-narrow aperture of f/51. Everything except the mushroom's"peak" and stem are in good focus. However, the background, though not in good focus, is quite distracting. Not really what I wanted.

So for the rest of the shots I got close enough with my macro lens to largely eliminate any background. All of these were shot at a very narrow f/51. The first was OK, but it didn't tell much of a story.