Stacked Mushroom from Piddles Wood

Now that we are in the autumn season the fungi have arrived, and this year I have seen a lot of mushrooms very early on. On this particular day I headed out to Piddles Wood, near Sturminster Newton, as in past years there had been good showings.

Unfortunately, this time round it must have been too early for this habitat as there were only a few. That being said I did have some fun trying out stacking and also playing with my Olympus OM T32 colour filters.

First off the stack. To achieve this I took 9 shots all at F4 with my Zuiko Olympus OM 80mm F4 macro lens using natural light. This allows you to have a good depth of field through the subject whilst keeping the background blurred. To avoid camera shake and to take each shot that little bit closer each time I attached the lens to my Velbon Super Mag slider on top of the tripod head.

I then scanned the slide shots in using the Nikon Coolscan V ED, and from Photoshop CS5 Bridge loaded each image as a layer to Photoshop CS5. The next step is to auto align the 9 images before using the stack tool. This is the final result.

(Click on any image to scroll through them)

The next two shots are a couple of the original images used in this stack to give you an idea of the depth of focus at F4.

You may ask why did I not just use a greater depth of field (aperture) and save on shots. A closed down aperture  will bring more of the background into focus, and here is a shot of the same mushroom at F11.

This shot is also a classic example of why careful viewing through the lens at the aperture you are going to shoot at, prior to taking the shot. This should be done to make sure nothing is blocking the view or creating a distraction. Here I missed that annoying green grass!

As mentioned previously I also had a play with my Olympus OM T32 colour filter set for the first time this autumn, and this is the best result of the lot taken. Then intention here was to try and get a warm side lighting effect.

To do this I attached the Olympus OM T28 macro flash to the lens, and the flash heads had the Olympus OM T32 ND4 filters fitted on. I also used the Olympus OM T32 flash with the yellow filter, which was set up off cameera some distance behind and to the left of the subject. Aperture F11

All shots were on Fuji Velvia 50 slide film.