How do YOU cope ?

[david dell]

Take a pocket camera for the first record shot!.The specimen could be gone within the hour!Went home for the camera to deal with a pair of Amanita eliae and when i got back a "common interest" group had picked them up and put them in their box of interest items to be sorted out later.So said a dog-walker who had viewed them with interest!

[Neil]

Frustrating ain't it. But we have to remind ourselves that the fungi are not there just for mycologists, but for anyone interested enough to want to get a closer look. So as you say, get the shot when you can.

Neil.

[Mal Greaves]

I use my Canon compact almost as a notebook. I get some good shots but also lots of unusable. You just have to decide whether you are a camera man(person) with an interest in fungi or a budding mycologist with an interest in photography. I have seen the former spend half an hour or more on one photo and achieve stunning results but they "miss" 25 minutes of the foray. They come home with great photos but a lower number of finds. One such is http://mycoimage.co.uk/

Mal
PS nice to see you back in harness Merv

[Paul Hugill]

I went through this lengthy process of how to obtain decent macro photos of fungi, trying to balance low light, depth of field, colour balance, use of tripods, mirror lock, flash vs natural light, etc etc. Not easy! Eventually I wrote up all my findings in a book. However, the key issue is depth of field, and you really need to draw up a chart for your particular camera/lens combination to show depth of field for various distances and apertures. There are several websites with calculators for you to do this. One trick you might like to try if you can't get the whole fruitbody in focus within a single image is to take two images, one with the front half in focus, the other the rear half (using a tripod of course). Then superimpose one image on top of the other in Photoshop or similar, and using the eraser tool, rub through to uncover the sharper part of the image below. This works very well for single fruitbodies, less successful for groups.

[Roy Miller]

My photography skills are basic, but my philosophy is to take as many as you can, and hope against hope, that a few will be okay. At the end of the day, if the pictures are rubbish, you can always delete them.