Mushroom coral shrimp – periclimenes kororensis
Photographed at approximately 18 meters deep.
D800 in Ikelite housing, ISO100, 1/250 sec @ f/16, Tamron 90mm macro, 2 Ikelite strobes
mushroom
All posts tagged mushroom
Mushroom coral pipefish – siokunichtys nigrolineatus
Photographed at approximately 15 meters deep.
D800 in Ikelite housing, ISO100, 1/250 sec @ f/11, Tamron 90mm macro, 2 Ikelite strobes
Close up of a mushroom coral – heliofungia actiniformis
Photographed at approximately 7 meters deep.
D800 in Ikelite housing, ISO100, 1/250 sec @ f/8, Tamron 90mm macro, Ikelite DS161 strobe
D800, ISO400, 1/250 sec @ f/3.5, Tamron 90mm, off-camera SB-800
D800, ISO400, 1/125 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 50mm
D800, ISO400, 1/125 sec @ f/3.5, Tamron 90mm
That’s what happens when the weather gets (or has been) wet(ter) the whole summer. But it makes for some interesting sceneries…
…(and the reasons why you should have a good, calibrated screen for doing image editing and/or color corrections on photographs)
When I was driving home from work the other day I passed (again) this particular part of the route. There’s a little bench there that I’ve been meaning to take a picture of for years already, but never got around to.
Neither did I this time. But I noticed something else which I hadn’t noticed before, for some reason. Funny, because from the looks of it, they’d been there already for awhile, and they were almost ON the street. Instantly I thought “Light trails, long exposure”, and I decided to come back in the evening (with camera, duh).
And so I did. And I sat on my knees in the grass for almost 40 minutes, trying to get the right picture. Cars slowing down all the time, because they thought I was a cop photographing speeders 😀
It was a bit tricky, because of my positioning. I didn’t have much choice here, since right next to the mushrooms was a massive tree that I didn’t want in the picture, and a bit further on the road was a curve which would give a good swing to the light trails. But that meant that the cars coming towards me would shine there headlights pretty much straight into my lens.
And so it didn’t quite turn out the way I wanted. I had to make, or try to, separate exposures for tail lights and head lights and combine them in post-processing.
That worked out quite ok in the end.
But then there’s the thing with the screens. One image (the bottom one) I did on my desktop computer, with big, calibrated, graphic screen. The other one I did on my laptop, which, quite frankly, is a piece of crap graphically speaking. Sure, I tried calibrating it, but that only makes things worse. Glossy screen, reflecting the sh!t out of everything near and if you bat your eyelashes the color changes. So apologize you me for the bad quality of that first image. I will make a post in the coming days, when I get back to my good computer, where I put the two side by side: one done on the laptop and the other one done on the desktop, and see the difference.
Anyways… Fall wasn’t quite over yet.
D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm, off-camera SB-800 (flashed manually several times on the mushrooms near the end of the 30 second exposure)
D700, ISO200, 20 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50mm, off-camera SB-800 (flashed manually several times on the mushrooms at the beginning of the 20 second exposure)
Although temperatures are dropping, it’s still fall. In all it’s glory.
I promised I’d give you some more. I’m not going for all the colorful leaves this year (yet, at least). You’ve probably seen plenty of that.
The other day, when I was driving home, I noticed a whole bunch of mushrooms in a garden patch right out front the building. Had planned to go take some pictures of it, but the weather’s been so crappy that I never got to it. Last Sunday was such a glorious fall day, though, that I finally got to go out and shoot them. Plastic garbage bag a-ready, because I was sprawled out on the wet grass on my belly, getting down and dirty, and up close and personal. I missed all the funny looks from passers-by, but that’s ok. I had some pretty cool views myself.
D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/8, Tamron 90mm macro, 2x off-camera SB-800
D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/9.5, Tamron 90mm macro, 2x off-camera SB-800
But the coolest thing… shows that you should SO shoot in RAW to retain as much image detail as you possibly can… was this one:
D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/8, Tamron 90mm macro, off-camera SB-800
What’s so special about this, you’d probably wonder… Well, I didn’t think of it much first. It’s a funky image with the mushrooms like this and the detail “under the hood”, but when I had it open in Lightroom I noticed the mosquito. Here’s a cut-out of the original:
Partial close-up of the original
As a silhouette the mosquito isn’t all that bad either, but I opened it up in Photoshop and went to see how much detail there really was recorded in the RAW file. So with a few adjustments in exposure and curves, and a pixel-perfect mask on the mosquito
The layer mask for the mosquito and the (adjustment) layer panel in Photoshop
the whole thing turned out to be a surprisingly sharp image of the mosquito (lucky focusing there, I guess 😉 ). No additional sharpening has been done here. The SB-800 was lying upside down in the dirt to the left (upside down, because I wanted the flash to flash upwards under the cap of the mushroom) and I guess there was so much light bouncing back off the stem and cap of the mushroom that it lit up the mosquito completely. It almost looks like it’s transparent or something. Really cool. Anyway… Ramblings of a biased photographer.
Partial close-up of the adjusted image
By the way… If anyone knows what mushroom this is, feel free to drop me a line. I suck in recognizing plants and other vegetables and Google isn’t much help in this either 😉
When these guys come out, you know “that” time has come.
“That” time in “this” country means an abundance of colors, shapes and other goodies to take pictures of.
Other pictures will follow, I have no doubt, but for now I’m sticking to this particular (poisonous) hallucinogen: the fly agaric.
D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/4, Nikkor 50mm
D700, ISO1600, 1/180 sec @ f/16, Tamron 90mm macro
Oh, and have you ever wondered why they are called “fly agarics”?
I have. And I never really understood (must admit that I never really try to find out why either), but well… Here you go:
D700, ISO200, 1/20 sec @ f/9.5, Tamron 90mm macro
Apparently in the early days it was used as an insecticide and it clearly works well. This bug isn’t peacefully enjoying its sunny day, it’s RIP-ing in its colorful coffin. The mushroom isn’t a flesh eater, though.
It actually did stop raining. I took a good walk with my better half today (still walking off the extra pounds that I gained back in the US 😉 ).
Fall colors are really coming through now everywhere. I’ll save you a lot of reading, just look at the pictures.
D200, ISO100, 1/1000 sec @ f/2.8, Tamron 28-75mm
D200, ISO100, 1/90 sec @ f/4.8, Tamron 28-75mm
D200, ISO100, 1/60 sec @ f/2.8, Tamron 28-75mm, off-camera flash SB-800
D200, ISO100, 1/90 sec @ f/5.6, Tamron 28-75mm
D200, ISO100, 1/60 sec @ f/2.8, Tamron 28-75mm, off-camera flash SB-800
Supposedly the most popular place for picking berries and mushrooms in the greater Helsinki area. I went there with my better half for a good hike and some more colorful pictures than edible mushrooms. The lush green of the moss for example. It’s so soft that you have to suppress the urge to just lie down and go to sleep in it (I’m still not completely rid of my jet lag, so it really was tempting).
D200, ISO100, 3 sec @ f/13, Sigma 10-20mm
The marshes (Mustalampi) also looked very tempting. Looked, though… step in it in the wrong spots and you’ll be in water all the way up to your knees, if not higher.
D200, ISO100, 1/6 sec @ f13, Tamron 28-75mm
D200, ISO100, 1/6 sec @ f/13, Tamron 28-75mm
And many other colorful and less colorful things. If only we had more time… the 10 km walk that we did took us a good three hours. I take all the blame for it.
D200, ISO100, 1/90 @ f/5.6, Sigma 10-20mm
D200, ISO100, 1,5 sec @ f/13, Sigma 10-20mm
D200, ISO100, 1/30 sec @ f/5.6, Sigma 10-20mm