If you’re looking for something new to try with your camera, here’s a suggestion: go out the morning after a rainstorm, or perhaps the morning after the morning after a rainstorm, and look for some mushrooms. You’ll often find them in damp spots that get a mix of shadows and sunlight, and if conditions are still cloudy in the post-rain period then you could be in for a real treat. I’ve taken a handful of mushroom photos over the years and am rarely disappointed, and often impressed, with what I can find either in my own yard or just by taking a short walk.
That was the case here. I was out for a walk across campus to run an errand and, because I had my camera with me, thought I would take a stroll around Theta Pond on my way back to the office. It had rained the past few days and I thought I might find some flowers or leaves or other plant parts with a bit of that classic post-precipitation shine to them or perhaps some drops of water too. Turns out that prediction was somewhat unfounded, since most things had kind of dried up by that point. Not the soil, mind you, but the visible drops on leaves and petals had mostly evaporated. I did, however, spot this mushroom hiding somewhat underneath a shrubbery and immediately decided that it would make an interesting photo opportunity. I set my camera on the ground, enabled Live View, tilted the LCD screen up, dialed in an aperture of f/4, and took a few shots. They were fine, but nothing particularly spectacular–something was missing, or perhaps just not quite right, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. I stood up, circled the protruding fungus just a bit, and then it hit me: it wasn’t that anything was amiss regarding the mushroom. It was the background that proved to be problematic. In my original shots there were just too many distractions behind the mushroom, either colored flower petals or bits of light poking through the shallow canopy. It was cluttering up the shot, and dividing the viewer’s attention away from the subject.
The solution? Just move my perspective a bit. I scooched my camera over a bit, roughly 90 degrees from its original position, and took the shot you see here. It does a much better job of capturing the essence of a mushroom hidden in its own little world, poking up from the wet ground and tucked under an umbrella of green leaves. This image hasn’t been cropped and everything you see here was captured entirely in camera, and I really like the mood and feeling evoked by what you see. It was a fun photo to take, and a good reminder to me that if something isn’t working out (either in photography, or in life) it might help to just view it from a different angle or perspective. You never know what might happen.
Leave a Reply