Mushroom Macros - Part I: Equipment
I love autumn photography, the colours are special, the light less harsh and the temperatures more manageable. One of my favourite things though is mushroom photography. Okay, so technically speaking it's not full macro photography, it's close-up photography, but a lot of the hardware and techniques are the same. I'm going to break this post down into two parts. This one is going to be predomidantly about the hardware, partly because I haven't seen many others using a couple of tricks that I've discovered over the years. The next post will be about camera settings and post-processing including stacking/bracketing settings.
The Gear
Most tripods allow you to invert the centre column so that you can attach the camera upside down to get lower than with the legs splayed fully out. I quickly came up with the idea of adding a rail to this combined with an Arca-Swiss clamp so that the camera is right way up again.
This rail is a real game-changer in terms of camera operation and positioning and I would strongly recommend this cheap solution to anyone doing this more than once (approx. €30 for the rail plus €15 for an attachable Arca-Swiss clamp).
Non-Camera Gear | Camera Gear |
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The geared head allows much more precise camera positioning than a standard ball head and you can dial in the exact spot.
As well as keeping the camera in the correct orientation, the rail allows you to physically zoom in and out; a lot of macro lenses are fixed focal length and this makes repositioning very easy.
A wireless remote (I hot-glued an attachment point for a lanyard to the back of mine after loosing it for the dozenth time in a random pocket) is really useful for trigerring the shutter release.
The lights are useful for illuminating the dark undersides of fungi or for shining though the top of the mushrooms if they're transluscent. I generally photograph mushrooms in low or flat light to avoid high-contrast light and the associated hot-spots on the photos. With
It's often difficult to find mushrooms that can be photographed from beneath to reveal the beautiful gill structures like this and it's always a thrill to find them. Old forest floors with good moss coverage or uncleared fallen branches and trunks that have been left in place for a couple of years are much better locations than highly-managed timber forests with bare ground between the trees. The dark green moss also serves as a great contrast point to yellow, red or white mushrooms. I'll cover some post-processing tips in the next post.
One of the greatest challenges with close-up and macro photography is the limited depth of field - the distance either side of the focal plane that is acceptibly in focus. People tend to forget that this isn't just a function of the aperture, but also of focal length and distance to the subject. Because the distance is often very short in macro photography, the depth of field is also very narrow. If you look closely at the lower mushrooms in the two images above, you'll see that the two tiny mushrooms hiding away at the bottom of the image are soft in the first shot but sharp in the lower one.
The first shot was taken at f/11 on a m43 camera, in depth of field terms the equivalent of f/22 on a full frame camera, yet still the bottom of the image is out of focus. I like my details to be in focus in these shots and this can be achieved using a technique called focus bracketing. Essentially this means taking a series of images at varying focal points through the image and taking the sharpest points from each to create a hybrid image in the digital darkroom (focus stacking). The next post will deal with exactly how this can be done, looking at the necessary camera settings and how the images can be processed using specialist software on the PC or, in the case of OM System cameras, in camera.
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