Mushroom Gorge

I normally post photos in the order that they were taken. If I take a picture at 2:30pm and then another one at 2:35pm, my usual course of action is to post the first one first, and the second one second. Sometimes it’s just easier to do it that way since it makes logical sense in my mind, but there’s also the educational angle I like to consider too: the latter image will often be informed by something I learned when composing the former image. And while that progression is certainly the case when looking at this week’s image next to last week’s image, I ended up posting them out of order just because I really liked the second one more than the first. And because it’s my blog, I figure…why not :)

Side note in case you’re wondering: These are not mushrooms, nor is there a gorge anywhere nearby. Rather, they remind me of a particularly memorable course from Mario Kart Wii. Not a particularly awesome course, but one that sticks in my mind due to the way it sends all the racers bouncing atop giant mushrooms sticking far into the air. Also, my oldest son wanted me to mention that there is, and I quote, “an insane wall-clipping glitch” on that level that he and his brother invented.

In a lot of ways this is the photo that could have been. It’s a good start, but I think if I could do it differently I would have changed a few things to get a better end result. Overall the composition is fine, but there are two main factors that make this about a C+ or B- instead of a solid A. The first is the focus: At f/9.5 the depth of field is fine, but a smaller aperture would have yielded a much sharper subject while still, I’m pretty sure, giving plenty of blur to the background. Even after more than a year I still don’t quite have a good sense of how apertures work when shooting at very close range on my macro lens, and I almost always end up taking pictures at wider apertures than I really need to. In this case, had I shot at f/16 or f/22 I think I would have gotten a much better result without much in the way of compromise.

The other factor that hinders this image is the exposure. I should have underexposed it slightly and then adjusted in Lightroom, but as it stands the subject is a bit too overexposed and there’s nothing I could do to get it under control. Despite shooting in RAW and having access to all the data captured by the camera sensor, there aren’t really any viable options when there is no data to use at all–which is exactly what you see in the blown-out highlights.

So what do I like about this photos? For one, I think the huge circle of sun blur right behind the subject is pretty awesome. I don’t think I could have planned that better even if I had tried, and it’s something that I am probably not likely to replicate any time soon. I also like the subject in the center paired with another one of these plant-thingeys off to the side and behind it. It lends a sense of three-dimensional space that I think is really cool. Also, I like that my wife said she likes this picture, and at the end of the day I trust her judgement much more than my own :D