Flies and Fungi

The Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) gets its name from the tradition of using this mushroom as an insecticide. In some European countries, caps are crumbled up and placed in saucers of milk to attract house flies. The flies drink the milk, which contains ibotenic acid that not only attracts flies but also poisons them. Certainly in the field, I haven't seen flies visiting Fly Agarics while other species are a great attraction. Sandy RSPB reserve had abundant fungi yesterday, including some very magnificent Parasols in the large meadow by the house.

Cromer Beach at Low Tide

Yesterday's tide was one of the lowest of the year and coincided with a very sunny warm day (until the rain arrived!). Just right for reflections on the wet sand and interesting foreground details!

Half Marathon Continued

I took some wide angle shots at the half marathon, some panned at 1/125th sec to give an idea of movement. The wide view is taken at the bottom of the 'hill' while the cheerful faces are at the top of the hill where a great team of supporters were encouraging the runners to get to the top. 

Cambridge Half Marathon

I agreed to take images of some runners in the Cambridge Half Marathon representing the Sports Connections Foundation Charity so we found a good spot to watch the runners with the aim of identifying and photographing their 11 runners out of the 15000 runners. All we know was they were wearing red T-shirts with their charity logo. Well we managed to snap 7 of their runners but also had an enjoyable time watching the race unfold. Here are the first runners through our 'checkpoint' at 7+ miles. Jonathan Escalante-Phillips was the final winner in 1 hour and 6 mins and many of the runners whose numbers can be read in this top group finished within 1 hour 12 mins.

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.

More Fungi - Sheringham woods

Apologies for more toadstools but it is that time of year!! Here some taken in very mixed woodland (Beech, Conifer, Silver birch, Oak etc) near Sheringham. I was using an LED light that can be set to daylight temperature and gives a very natural look to the image - all with the Fuji compact camera (F16 in most cases). Next step best setting for focus stacking to give some detail in the surroundings but isolate the toadstool a bit more.