Flourishing Fungi

(6 photos) – Yesterday after some rain, I spotted some wonderful bright coloured fungi close to home on a quick mountain bike ride, so I revisited today on foot with some picture capturing gear.

First time I’ve ever seen two caps on one stem! These tiny orange fungi were scattered in a cleared grassy fire break, there were quite a few of them though I only saw one “twin” like this.

The little insect was crawling about having a good munch, so glad I didn’t leave it another day. I was lucky it stayed fairly still for my 15 exposures.

The images above and below are almost identical, but I used my bike light to provide some back lighting above, and below I had the light on the ground some distance for side lighting. It’s the first time I’ve tried this.

These photographs were taken with the Olympus EM1 Mark II and 60mm Macro lens, focus stacked in camera with 15 images per photo.

The purple fungi below, I manually merged two stacked images to increase the areas in focus – a total of 30 images. It was also lit underneath with my bike light at a distance to illuminate the stem 🙂

For comparison, below is the best shot I could squeeze out of my Galaxy S20. It doesn’t have a good minimum focusing distance and is really not good for close-up work, the S8 was actually better! I used the “telephoto” mode at 3x to get this shot.

And in case you missed it, below was my favourite fungi shot from last year! I’m hoping to find more of these tiny Mycena Interrupta this season. Happy Autumn 😀