Mushroom.
It’s not often I find an awesome mushroom I feel excited to take macro photo of. And it wasn’t even the subject of choice.
I came to a location I struggle to make good photos at – Sopota waterfall. I went there multiple times during heavier rainfall, always expecting to find a good photo for once.
Finally, I found it. But not of the waterfall.
While I was walking around the location a white spot caught my eye. A small mushroom was peaking out of the shrubbery at the base of a tree. I decided to take a test photo just to see, if it looked good. And it did.
But it wasn’t a straightforward shot. I was crouching under the tree in a very uncomfortable position. I struggled with the tripod position because there was very little space. Alas, I made it. As I usually do, I also added an additional light source for extra light. I know it really helps with mushrooms from past experience.
I started taking photos. Photo after photo. Focusing manually and very carefully. It was going quite well. Sometime towards the middle of the shoot, after I already took over 20 photos, some wind started to blow.
The way I’m taking this sort of photos is like this. I have a 2 second timer set. Meaning that two seconds pass between the press of the shutter button and photo actually being taken. Each time I take the photo. It’s a slow process.
But the wind forced me to wait a few minutes between each photo, prolonging the process. It made further progress extremely slow. Even slower than usual. My patience was being tested.
I took all the photos I thought I’d need after what felt like an absolute age. I though my legs would simply refuse to do anything being crouched for so long. But they didn’t.
With all 150 photos I went home. I transferred all of them to my computer and started the process of assembling them into one. I’m using a focus stacking software to the job. It created an image and I felt… Underwhelmed.
The composition kind of worked, but the colors… They were horrific. And worst of all, I made a mistake. I should have compensated for the light source I added, but didn’t. The mushroom was so over exposed I looked awful.
I was thinking how to fix it for a long time. I was trying different settings, but none of them worked.
Until I tried black and white conversion. It simply worked better than anything else. And I really like it.
