Power-Up

The Super Mario Bros. mushroom power-up is one of the most iconic images in gaming, and perhaps even the broader landscape of popular culture. Its squat, stumpy, anthropomorphic appearance is instantly recognizable, whether made from 256 pixels on the original NES to…whatever they use on the latest Mario games. It’s instantly recognizable as a mushroom, and yet, it’s not often that we see natural phenomenæ that actually resemble it. Or, at least, I don’t recall seeing many mushrooms like the ones in a Mario game in my yard, on hikes, or anywhere. But on a recent rainy morning as I was, and I swear I am not making this up, just walking around in my yard looking for photo opportunities with my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens in hand, I came across the little fungal blob featured as today’s photo. I thought it would make an interesting shot, and kind of as an afterthought I also realized that it looked just a tiny bit like its 8-bit counterpart. Though unlike one of the Mario Brothers, I did not attempt to eat it in order to gain super powers. Maybe next time.

The mushroom was about an inch and a half tall, nestled among some ground cover and glistening with a sheen brought on by a night of precipitation. It really did give me the sense that it had just poked up from the ground, defying the dirt and gravity in the process, and was triumphantly announcing its presence to any who happened to be in the area. Such as me :) I lowered my camera to the ground, dialed in an aperture of f/16, and fired off a couple shots at slightly different angles. Unlike last week’s mushroom photo I really didn’t consider a variety of vantage points; I knew that this view would give me the photo I was looking for, complete with green grass in the background and even one blade in the foreground for context but also to reinforce the idea that the viewer was peeking into a bit of a hidden world. I particularly liked the rich colors present in every portion of the frame: deep oranges, rich reds, bright greens, and brown earthtones throughout. What really struck me though was all the dirt specks on the cap of the mushroom, and the bright spot of light on the top left portion of the bulbous dome. It really helps sell how wet everything was, which doesn’t really come through too well in the other elements such as the grass and leaves.

This photo, in a sense, is everything I like about taking pictures. It’s an interesting subject that I was able to capture just a few feet from my house, and in doing so it forced me to look at something familiar in a new way. I’m not saying that all pictures have to do that kind of thing, and sometimes it’s fun to just go out and shoot everyday things like food, cars, fences, light posts, and other normal objects for no particular reason than you just want to. I certainly do, and anything that gets your camera off the shelf and into your hands is a good thing. But sometimes it’s also cool to push just a little bit more, and find ways to use photography to see the familiar, the pedestrian, the incredibly normal, in a way that is anything but.