Puffball

[Nancy Bell]

I wanted to capture the spores as the wind stirred them up and away from the mushroom. The last rays of light were shining and making the "dust" golden. I used parts of me to block the sun from the surrounding grasses but also had to darken the grasses more in processing. I took lots of images, trying to capture the "dust" just right with both exposure and direction.

Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 24-105 f4 IS, 1/125, f9, ISO 1250.

C & C most appreciated.

[Mitch Haimov]

Okay, that's exquisite! The grass doesn't make the ideal BG, but you so nailed the light and exposure on the puffball and the spores. Congrats on getting the moment! As an Out Of The Box photographer, you may want to make a second, darker RAW conversion so you can paint the the sunlit blades of grass into this one. I also recommend cropping from right and bottom.

I'm not familiar with this fungus, but now I'd love to watch one develop and pop. Actually, that could be a great time-lapse project; would probably want to increase exposure frequency when it gets ready to let go. High speed video of the event so you could slow it down would also be very interesting, especially if you could arrange for the light to be as in this thread.

[Steve Maxson]

What a cool capture, Nancy! Did you have to do anything to "encourage" the spores to be released? I really like how the sun lights up the cloud of spores. You might consider toning down the bright grasses in the LLC as they are drawing my eye. You get high marks for creativity on this one!

[Jonathan Ashton]

Nice one Nancy, you caught the spores well the rest is a little too dark for my taste but something you can work on.
I did something similar a long long time ago (before digital!) I placed a flash gun behind the fungus and I dropped water from a pastette onto the fungus, as the spores flew I took the image with a cable release. Similarly when silver birch catkins are pollen laden, place a gun behind and out of site and tap the branch with a pencil or something similar.

[Mitch Haimov]

Dark areas work well for me...

[Nancy Bell]

This was a spur of the moment as I watched the spores in the sunlight. I would have liked to have had a dark cloth to drape over the bright green grasses also catching the sunlight. At one point I had my husband gently blow into the fungus to stir up the spores but he created a dust storm and all I got was a bright yellow grainy image :eek3:! With the fungus this wide open, inside the spores looked like a layer of very fine brown dust. The number of actual spores must be huge!

[Gabriela Plesea]

Brilliant capture Nancy, fascinating stuff!

Kind regards,