Woodland Fungi MACRO PHOTOGRAPHY | Photographing Mushrooms in the Autumn Pentax Challenge 

ha! I hope not, be nice to share the limelight in great company such as yours Kobie.

Thank you Richard. Appreciate your comments, feel free to share this video on your social media too

Thank you. I really enjoyed make these images too.

Thank you for your kind words Normski. Please do let me know how you get on. 😀

Thank you Martin. Pleased to read you enjoyed the video and found it informative.

thank you Danny. PLease le me know eher ei can see your results when you have got some photos.

Thank you.

Thank you

Thank you. Pleased to read you enjoyed the video and images.

Thanks Steve, I hope you will see the advantage it brings if you have a focus breathing lense. Would love to see your results.

Thank you Harry. I pleased with how they have come out too.

Thank you. Thats very kind of you to say. If you go out and take some images please do let me know, always love to see my subscribers photos.

Thanks Mark. If you do make the Malverns there is some nice woodland on Jubilee Way :)

Thank you Craig

Thanks Mark.

Thank you Kevin, pleased to read you found it useful. I personally prefer it to focus stacking for the reasons mentioned in my video, but the added benefit is then using the best of the additional frames to touch up your initial stacked result.

Thanks a lot! wow my first comment from Norway! this is a good sign. I'm pleased to read you enjoyed the images. I'll do my best to keep the films coming.

Thanks you im pleased to read you enjoyed the video, please feel free to share it on your social media.

Thank you Neil. Pleased to read you enjoyed them.

Thank you Andrew.

Ha yes I am for one month only, well at least on the woodland macro... more videos to come im sure. Hopefully an upcoming trip to Cornwall will present plenty of opportunity for landscape and seascape films to be made.

Thank you Stanislav.

Awe thanks Lee, but honestly the month is young yet and there are so many other people who are in the challenge that make equally if not better production and images. Looking forward to seeing what everyone produces, the real winner is Pentax!

Thanks Jason. Pleased to read you enjoyed the video. I'd love to see the results.

Thank you. Great to see a comment from a fellow Pentax K1 user on here.

thank you. Please do share with me your results. Good luck!

Thanks Terry, I feared I might not get up and or risk passing out, I had spent several hours on the ground and even worn in a (snow) Leaf Angel into the fallen leaves - So I decided to end the video where I was and not further embarrass myself .

awee thanks Lee. I hope/looking forward to seeing yours too.

Thank you Steve.

Glad you enjoyed. 😉

Thank you

Thank you Stephen, I hope you enjoy the other videos produced. Welcome to my little corner of youtube :)

Thankyou Jessica, really kind of you to take the time to leave a comment, i hope you enjoy my other videos too. I was thinking of doing video on glowing shrooms, either bioluminescent with a black light of the more youtube way of using a torch and multiple frames to build out the image. I need to get back into the woods with the camera and see what flows. Once again thank you for watching please do share the video on your social media and help spread the word :)

Thanks Dave, I hope you will see the advantage it brings if you have a focus breathing lens. The benefit I feel it brings is it allows you to stack out the images to give you the best focus though the range of the subject but also take the best or frame to touch up the end result via masking.

Thanks KC, Still lots of time left and some very good photographers still in the race.

Look forward to sering your results Paul.

Cheers Nigel . By chance have you visited the local bird hide recently? I quite fancy doing a video on wildlife and that could be a great location to shoot/film from... reason I ask is I'm not sure If i'll need a machete to get to the hide :)

@@GeoffMoorePhotography I havnt been there recently but I expect you may need waterproofs as the nettles etc will be soaking. They will have died back a bit by now, they were in full growth when we went earlier in the year. The wildlife will also be different due to the time of year!

I feel a plan is needed! :)

Thanks Chris. Let me know how you get on . Hopefully the apature stacking will work out for you too. Would love to see your results

@@GeoffMoorePhotography yeah will do

Thank you Dave. Give it a go, I would love to know how you get on. Please do also share the images you make, always keen to see my subscribers photography

​@@GeoffMoorePhotography I love making photos of mushrooms in the fall. but focus stacking never suited me. I definitely want to try aperture stacking, But how do you do that you could make a video about it. that would be nice.

@@MrArn0ldus I covered it in the video :)

Thanks Tony. I had a vision/brief in my mind I was working too hence the editing and processing you see.

Thank you

Thank you for your comment. I'll see what I can do as the fungi season is soon upon us here in the UK

Thank you. Let me know how you get on and I'd love to see your results.

Thanks Wayne, pleased to read you enjoyed the video

Hey DMN63 im using a Pentax K1 and the 100mm Macro. Further Info is in the video description :)

About 30 mins. Biggest time taken is getting the images imported, catalogued and keywords in lightroom. Sometimes an image can take a lot longer, it really depends on what i'm trying to achieve with the image and the feeling i want it to convey

Thanks Richie. I have, but it's to much faff and clunky for my liking. It's a good shout though. I much prefer the hands on camera approach and a 2nd second timer. Also for macro work I don't use autofocus as I prefer manually focusing.... coming to think about it, I don't use AF all that much... might be another video in that 😀

Thank you Pure, the processing of the images is really quite simple in the sense I use Adobe Lightroom for the initial edits and the work my way down the sections and adjusting to taste, once I have my base image feeling how I want it , then I jump ver in to PS to remove any blemishes and do some final colour corrections etc. Its really hard for me to give a prescriptive breakdown of each step as I dont edit to a rule, rather I edit to to a feeling/emotion that I get from an image if that make sense. I have been asked many times to produce a video on my editing process, perhaps I should just make one so people can see me moving lightroom sliders about :)

@@GeoffMoorePhotography I am really interested in your process of aperture stacking. I had never heard of this before this video, which I really enjoyed and found informative. I even did a search using my Google machine here and didn't find any information on focus stacking, either on the internet in general or on RU-vid specifically.

@@bkc1965 thank you for the comment. As per the video I use aperture stacking rather than focus stacking (where the focal length from camera to subject changes cause the subject to change in relative size between shots) due to the impact focus breathing has upon the resultant images. I find it typically harder to stack the images. With Aperture stacking I get around the focus breathing issue and for the most part can cover the full depth of feild of the subject front to back within an aperture range of a macro lens, especially true when dealing with smallish subjects like mushrooms and fungi. I find that when I take the images into post production I have more freedom to decide how much or how little of the subject i want in focus and whilst also treating the subject independently from the background. i.e I can use a frame from 2.8 for the background giving that lovely out of focus result yet the subject can then be stacked up from 2.8 to say f16 giving pinpoint sharpness from edge to edge or anything in-between. In reality there is subtle difference between the approaches of Focus and Aperture stacking, probally not enough to warrant much further or deeper conversation on the internet, but its does existing as an alternative which I hope by sharing it would be of interest to others.

Thank you charles, the images are opened up in layers in photoshop and then stacked. Masking is then applied to control the depth of feild for the subject and for the background etc. Additional edits are then done on colour and tonality, a bit of dodging and burning and some additional sharpening where needed.

@@GeoffMoorePhotography Thanks Geoff.

Hello Wilfried. Use the high apertures like 2.8 for the background and out of focus areas you want. Then with the sequence of stacked aparatures, using a stacking program like Helicon focus or Zerene stacker to combine to produce a sharp and in critical focus subject front to back. From there you can mask back in your blurred background. Unfortunately some editing is required to get the intended results.

@@GeoffMoorePhotography Thanks for the advice. The interesting thing is: For a sharp subject I really like just to use a single stopped down image (like at f/11), since it gives me that natural transition in sharpness from front to back without looking too soft and also without looking unnatural: In contrast, with focus stacking, I get perfect sharpness from front to back, which looks a bit too 2-dimensional in my opinion. I don't need a stack actually for the mushroom itself, since the single f/11 image already provides a perfect rendition of it. While the mushroom itself looks really good at f/11, the problem with such a stopped down image is, that the background usually looks way too busy. So what I really would like to do is to combine the f/11 image with another image that was taken at wide open aperture (like f/2). This works well enough with one caveat... it's the edges. In the image taken with f/2, the mushroom is much more blurred, which results in this blur expanding further than the edges of the mushroom in the f/11 picture do. So, if I want to use the f/2 picture as a background, there will be a blurry "halo" around the nicely sharp f/11 mushroom. Of course I can work on that in post production. For example, I can try to remove the mushroom entirely in the f/2 image, extending the background with an automatic image repair tool. Now I can use this f/2 image as background without getting any halo. This works pretty well, but requires a lot of work for very precisely masking out the mushroom in the f/11 image, since I want to prevent any of the busy background of the f/11 image to appear in the final picture, but I also don't want to take away anything from the mushroom itself. So this has to be done very accurately, since sloppy editing at the edges looks quite bad. Now there are ideas how to make life a bit easier for these things. So I could use a piece of cardboard to take another image at f/11 without background (by just placing the cardboard behind the mushroom on location). This would probably make the masking a bit easier. (Maybe you also have any ideas for a good way doing this masking, since this is the most labor-intensive part of the whole process?) For getting a clean f/2 background image, there's a very simple way to achieve a perfect result: If the mushroom is edible, just harvest it and then take the f/2 picture. However it's still a bit unsatisfying since I also want to be able to make pictures without removing or damaging any mushrooms. So I'll probably continue using the photoshop image repair for removing the entire mushroom digitally from the f/2 image.

The idea is to help with stacking images in post where the lens exhibits breathing as you focus on different parts of an image resulting in the out of focus parts blooming. Also. A subject shot at 20cm at f16 is unlikely to be in focus front to back so additional frames would be required regardless. An additional benefit of apature stacking is it's easy to mask in areas you want to be really out of focus due to frames captured at shallow dof thus aiding in creating those soft and dream like images.

Thanks Keith. You may notice from my other videos and flickr stream I tend not to produce clinically sharp images .

Auto bracketing would suggest to me taking a shot with exposure x stops under, at normal exposure and then, x stops over exposure. I think you mean auto focus stacking? Which isn't the same aperture stacking as I demo'ed in this video.

Yes. It was my creative decision. Thanks for watching.