Fungi Workshop

I was up early and left home just before 6am to drive to the New Forest in Dorset to meet Guy Edwardes for the fungi workshop. We were due to meet at 8am but I did not want to be late in case there was traffic, and I also had time to stop at a motorway services to get a coffee.

It was an extremely productive and busy day. Guy would find suitable fungi and we (there were only three of us) would set about photographing the various ones he found. We obviously were focus stacking, and as most new cameras these days have an inbuilt focus stacking feature it was easy to set the parameters and let the camera stack them. The skill comes in choosing the correct focal starting point and selecting the necessary number of images to stack to ensure the entire fungi is sharply focused. I was recommended to choose 100 images to stack, not that I would use all of them but just to ensure I had every detail covered. For individual fungi I used less images. As a result I shot more than 2,600 images today, which will probably only yield about 28 images. 

We worked all day, we had a quick break for lunch in Lyndhurst at 2pm at a lovely cafe and then went back into another area of the forest and only finished at 6pm, so it has been a long day. I only got home just before 8pm due to traffic and have not even looked at all the images yet. Photoshop is too slow and sometimes inaccurate to focus stack large numbers of images, so I will download Helicon Pro to focus stack these. But that is something for next week. For now I quickly selected some images out of the 100 taken per subject resulting in two images that Photoshop could focus stack. These purple fungi are amethyst deceivers, and the extra is a magpie inkcap (shot with a long lens rather than a macro lens).

Tomorrow is busy, I need to pack and get to the airport for my flight to Zurich. Tommy is looking after Xena this weekend.