Porcelain mushrooms

[Jerry van Dijk]

Panasonic DMC-FZ18, handheld (IS),
Leica 4.6-83 mm @ 83 mm (500 mm DSLR equivalent),
ISO-100,
F/4.2, 1/30 sec., aperture priority, pattern metering, no EC.
PP in Silkypix and Corel Photopaint. Horizontal crop from vertical frame. Cloned out some bright spots in the BG.

Wishing you all a happy new year and the best of luck for 2009 :)!
- Jerry -

[Julie Kenward]

Jerry, I know how hard these little guys are to photograph - too bright and they blow the highlights; too dark and you lose the translucency. I think, for the most part, you got this one right but I can see a couple of really bright spots on the tops of the mushrooms that might benefit from being cloned out/over.

Also, did you realize you had such a gorgeous BG? I did a shadow/highlight adjustment in Photoshop and almost fell over when I saw all these colors come popping out! Here's your same image, only with a light clone on the hot spots and the shadow adjustment. I also did a very slight gaussian blur on the BG.

[denise ippolito]

Jerry, I like the orig. better-I like the "wet" look on the shrooms-nice composition and colors!

[Mike Moats]

Hey Jerry, I think I like the schooms in the original better and agree with Denise about the wet look, but I like the bright colorful BG in Jules version. As Jules points out, schooms or hard to shoot as the tops blow out while the under side is to dark. I carry a 12" silver/Gold reflector and use it to throw some light at the under side of the schooms which balances nicely with the tops.

[Jerry van Dijk]

Hi there, thanks for the comments and a happy new year to you all. I'll have a go at enhancing the BG colors, although they already look pretty okay in my uncompressed image. I think the wet look of these mushrooms is so characteristic for the species that i'll accept some blow outs on the whites. Mike's tip using a reflector makes a lot of sense. I'll try it next time. Do you have any idea over what distance that would work? These mushrooms were up pretty high in the tree and I had to use the full 500 mm zoom equivalent of my camera and considerable cropping to get them this large in the frame. I'm also guessing that you have to take care not to create an unnatural look with the additional light?
Hope you all have some great photographing opportunities this year!

- Jerry -