Bradgate Fungi

 The wet weather resulted in a fine show of fungi at Bradgate and the soft conditions were ideal for photography. Here a few of the species. The first two are handheld focus stacks; rest single shots with aperture adjusted to size of subject and therefore distance from subject.

Wandlebury Fungi

 It really was a case of the more you look the more you see at Wandlebury CCC outing yesterday. Certainly there were very few fungi that immediately took the eye. Most are focus stacks - all with FujiX100V.

Miniature Fungi in Hardwick Wood

Here is some of the miniature world on the floor of  Hardwick Wood, a pleasant walk on a warm sunny autumn day (before the heavy showers arrived!)

Brandon Country Park

Yesterday was our annual CCC fungi photography day at Brandon so a party of 20 members explored the area on a cold and later rather wet day. There were plenty of species there but a lot were damaged or eaten. However, still plenty to occupy the group and some very pleasing clumps etc. I was focus-bracketing (25 shots) with my Fuji X100v, sometimes with close-up filter, at around F4. I did a comparison shot at F4 and F2 (images 7 and 8) and the comparison shows the lens is a bit less sharp wide open though still very acceptable - the toadstools themselves, although in focus throughout from the stacking, are less 'crisp' - a dilemma as I do like the more diffuse background. Images 5 and 6 are shot at F8 and F11 and not stacked

 

Focus Stacking Experiments

Surprisingly few fungi in Hayley Wood compared with others visited but we found enough to take a variety of focus-bracketed images. The fly is a stack from just 5 images (F16) before it took off!. The fungi used larger stacks with apertures of F2-F8 (15 hand-held images using Fuji X100V plus Raynox 150). 

Following a very comprehensive talk by Duncan on various software for focus stacking, I returned to the images of the Shining Ink Cap and processed one stack with Zerene Stacker using PMax (my usual method) and DMap techniques and also Photoshop. Certainly for this image, DMap gave the sharpest image with least aberration, followed by Photoshop while the PMax technique produced a strong halo.

Fungi Hardwick Wood

I walked to our local ancient wood yesterday to see if the recent rain had brought forth any fungi. It is still very dry there (good for walking as the mud can get very deep in the winter!). I found a few very small specimens amongst the moss and photographed with 50mm macro and LED light using stacks of 45 images. Last images is with the 23mm lens and no stack.