Forest Mushrooms

[Dave Goldberg]

Mushroom season is coming to a close here in Northern Virginia. It was a bit disappointing on account of the dry weather, but I was fortunate to have found this group. They were high enough up that I didn't have to get down on the ground


Canon R7 with EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro. 0.6", f/11, ISO 100
Edited for white balance, tone and color with minor crop applied
Edited in Darktable, resized and exported with ON1

[Jonathan Ashton]

Dave welcome to Macro forum, I was beginning to think it had all but died!
Super introductory shot colours look good, the image is sharp.
I like as presented, a few minor tweaks I think would help. Firstly using the tripod slows you down, this I think can be a good thing. Assess the image in the viewfinder or rear screen, the background is as important as the subject, so what is good and what is not so good? All a question of opinion of course but I would suggest a little gardening before taking the image would have been good -e.g. remove the pale dried grass stems and I don't know if possible I may have removed the horizontal twig at the back and the dried leaf bottom left. The plant immediately behind - I would leave there, I think it adds context. Hope this helps.
I don't know if you have done any Photostacking? This can often give superior results by stacking several wide aperture images together to give optimal DOF.

[Dave Goldberg]

Dave welcome to Macro forum, I was beginning to think it had all but died!
Super introductory shot colours look good, the image is sharp.
I like as presented, a few minor tweaks I think would help. Firstly using the tripod slows you down, this I think can be a good thing. Assess the image in the viewfinder or rear screen, the background is as important as the subject, so what is good and what is not so good? All a question of opinion of course but I would suggest a little gardening before taking the image would have been good -e.g. remove the pale dried grass stems and I don't know if possible I may have removed the horizontal twig at the back and the dried leaf bottom left. The plant immediately behind - I would leave there, I think it adds context. Hope this helps.
I don't know if you have done any Photostacking? This can often give superior results by stacking several wide aperture images together to give optimal DOF.

Thank you for the kind words and advice. I'll have more macro that I can share, and hopefully that could help breath some life into the forum.

I agree with everything you said. I found that bringing out the details in the gills without going overboard on the local contrast was a challenge. Getting the sharp edges along the mushroom caps without halos was another. Mushrooms should never be crunchy... unless they're fried.

I did shoot a sequence of stacks, but I had too many problems with complex artifacts so I abandoned the project. I'm going to work on that a bit for the future.

Cheers

Dave G.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Dave it is easy to go overboard on the sharpening I agree. I sometimes find Clarity useful - so long as not overdone.

[Gabriela Plesea]

Lovely image Dave (love mushrooms!) and I agree with Jon, there's more you could do with this. I would crop from the LHS...perhaps a vertical composition would be more engaging, what do you think?

Then I would try fade the background further, yes to a bit of 'gardening' as per comment above, and perhaps more detail on those gills
Enjoyed viewing and hope you can post some more, thank you so much for sharing

Kind regards,