Mushroom Family

This is a classic example of how photo opportunities can be found in everyday life, if we take a little time to open our eyes just a bit wider to the world around us. The other day when my coworker and I left our building to run a short errand I noticed a small patch of mushrooms by the stairs, and at first didn’t think much of it. But as we walked past, I noticed how there was one tall mushroom and two shorter ones–almost like a father, his wife, and their offspring. Of course this personification is somewhat silly and childish, but it’s often through the eyes of a child that we see the world as it really is. Or perhaps, what it really can be.

I returned a short while later with my camera and lay flat on the ground, trying to get the framing just right. The overcast sky made for spectacular lighting, and I wanted to get the background just right so that this fungal family seemed almost ethereal and even a tad dreamlike. I shot this at f/2.8 since f/1.8 resulted in such a shallow depth of field that the middle mushroom was out of focus, and used ISO 200 to get things all nice and silky smooth. One thing that caught my eye in Lightroom was a bit of chromatic aberration along the top side of the mushrooms, which I am guessing was due to the extraordinary contrast between the white subject, dark background, wide aperture, and relatively inexpensive glass (higher-quality lenses handle this better at wider apertures, but a $200 Prime lens is a far cry from a high-quality L-series lens). Thankfully, software can fix these issues fairly easily and I am quite pleased with the result.