I felt it had been far too long since I’d visited the woods but when I looked at my last set of pictures from here it had only been 4 weeks .When its autumn though you have to get out and capture those wonderful colours before the autumn gales strip the leaves off the trees mind you there is nothing like taking yourself back to being a child when kicking all those leaves up. At East Blean there are no mature Beech trees the ones there are coppiced and many have grown into impressive multi stemmed specimens which I love to look at. This mean the leaves are often just above head height too which always looks great when they are backlit by a lovely gentle autumnal light

There are certain areas of the woods at East Blean I know will be lovely at this time of year and also favoured spots for finding some fungi but it has to be said there didn’t seem to be very much fungi about and I’d almost given up at finding one I was certain I would. I then remembered a spot in deep shade where I’d found the lovely sounding Candlesnuff Fungi last year and sure enough it was just where I expected to be once more. It’s a curious fungi that is tiny but getting down close to its level there is a lot of detail in it.

Being in deep shade the one thing that is essential for taking those pictures is to use a tripod and thankfully I’ve one that I can spread the legs low enough to get down that low. I have in the past though used my back pack to lean on as that often is just the right height anything to help you keep the camera as still as you can will help as even the slightest movement will show in your pictures at shutter speeds much below 1/30th second and when I looked at the exif data of all of my fungi shots they were all below 1/10th of a second. You would think that the easiest thing to do would be to use some fill in flash to compensate for the bad light and sometimes that does work but for me flash can be very harsh and does not do the job very well. I always carry a reflector in my bag and it was soon out and in use.

It’s amazing even in deep shade when you think there is no light to reflect back at your fungi just how much there is and I was really pleased just how much more of the fungi was shown by using the reflector the other thing that is essential to use to prevent camera shake is a remote control or if you don’t have one of those or if not use the cameras self timer mode. If you don’t want to go to the expense of getting a reflector some aluminium foil on a piece of card will do a good job too although the reflector I favour most for fungi is a gold coloured one.

Now it goes without saying unless you know you fungi very well and you can be certain what they are its best to leave them where they are. Looking in fungi books so many of them are poisonous so I much prefer to take pictures of them where they are

Please note that comments are moderated and may take some time to appear

Name

Email (will not be published)

Website

Title

Comment

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment