What I Learned from My First Attempt at Photographing Fungi

Autumn has arrived in my part of the world and every year I see photographers on YouTube getting out into the woodland to photograph fungi.

Since this was a new experience for me, I was excited to get out over recent days to discover the appeal of this type of photography.

I have to say first of all that I do like macro and close-up photography, and I have enjoyed several sessions of flower and insect photography over the summer months.

This left me fairly confident that I would also enjoy fungi photography, yet I was unprepared for the difficulties that I encountered.

My first outing was a photographic disaster! Most of my images were blurry or badly composed.

But I learned three lessons from this outing:

·      Fungi photography cannot successfully be accomplished while hand-holding a camera.

·      Fungi images need to be composed carefully if they are to look appealing.

·      Light, and the direction of light, are important considerations in this type of photography.

On my next outing I made some adjustments.

I brought my mini tripod, although at times it was not suitable for photographing tiny mushrooms that were close to the ground. For some images I found a stable position on a log or on the ground close to the subject and adjusted the camera position to suit.

The second change I made was to spend time with each subject, focusing on different parts of the composition to find the most appealing way to frame the individual subjects or small group of fungi, using the available light to the best advantage.

I also paid attention to the background elements and tried to ensure that tiny twigs, leaves, or pieces of tree bark didn’t distract from the main subjects. In some cases I had to gently move objects aside while being carefully not to damage any plants.

I love autumn colours in general landscape photography so in this miniature world I attempted to use colour to add a rustic, autumnal feel to my images.

While these changes did help to give me more well composed and in-focus images, I did have a few blurry offerings because I still had to press the shutter button by hand, so my final ‘note to self’ is – use the camera's self timer or, even better, purchase a remote shutter release!

If you are interested in trying fungi photography I hope that some of these tips will be useful.