Hello again. Well July has come and gone, and I’m finally starting to hit a good balance between work and photography. Shooting on Sundays, developing middle of the week when I have the energy, and scanning Friday night or Saturday morning seems to be a good cycle where I don’t feel burned out with either by trying to fit them both in. July was also a good month for mushroom photos and I got some new lights in since the last post so let’s dive right in! 

In last couple posts, I spoke about ghost pipes and mentioned I had taken a couple photos to finish a roll. Well here they are. I’m not attached to either of these photos as they don’t really convey anything and the compositions are just so-so, but the plant is just too neat to pass up. Being mushroom adjacent, I’m sure I’ll find more as the year goes on and able to make a photo I’m proud of from them.

Moving onto this past weekend, I came across some cute, extremely tiny boletes just up the climb at the falls to start my outing which were very close to these brown capped mushrooms. I may have tried to set up a shot on a different day, but it was very busy when I visited last weekend due to a children’s event out there. With so many families and screaming kids right at the falls, I got a bit overwhelmed and decided to hike about a half mile up the trail to get away from all the commotion and foot traffic. On the way, I found some of these blue staining boletes, but they were either kicked down or biked over before I got to them.

As it seems with every time I go hiking now, there were several new species of mushrooms popping up around the spots I like to stop at. The first shot of the day was this small common earth ball on the logs where I’ve shot the raspberry slime moulds and the broad gill mushrooms that I have in the “I’ll be Gone by Morning” set. I missed focus just slightly, but having lights I can control the shape of has made a huge difference in how I’m approaching these photos now that I don’t have to throw light on an entire scene.

After I came off the hill and back to the trail, this purple mushroom was jutting up right in the middle of the main path. I should have taken a step back to show both lights and how they’re positioned (and I’ll try to remember to in the future), but here’s setup/outcome shot.

This all lead me here. My favorite spot to shoot at, and I can’t tell you how excited I was to see these scaly ink caps hiding out in this log. I’ve shot them in there before, but the last time I tried, there were far fewer and in a worse position. This is also a spot (just to the left) where the ochre-spreading tooth mushrooms with the snail and the deer mushroom shots were taken. I imagine this spot is going to continue giving me plenty of subjects to photograph as the year goes on.

Oh is it another spore drop video? Damn straight! If you saw my last post about the oyster mushrooms dropping spores, you’ll know how happy watching this happen makes me. There’s so much life teeming inside this log being attracted by these mushrooms. I hope they made as good a meal for some bugs as they did photos for me because I’m chuffed with how they turned out.

One thing I tried and feel like I accomplished with this weeks photos using the new lights is that every photo showcases a different way to use them. I used snoots to create dramatic spotlights for the earth ball, barn doors to create slits of light on the purple bolete, and as a combination with the shaggy cap mushrooms. These photos, in my opinion, are also much more inline with the original goal I had for the project to create scenes similar to those in Dead of Night.

[As the Bare Naked Ladies starts to play in the background]

It’s been one week at work and I am feeling it! Being back to waking up at 5-6am and having my brain on for a solid 8 hours a day trying to create and figure out complex problems after months of time off has been a rough transition. I knew it was going to be a lot so I went out last weekend after some heavy thunderstorms hoping to catch some mushrooms thriving, and I wasn’t disappointed! The humidity made shooting a little bit of an issue as my lens and viewfinder were fogging up every time I went to focus (so it goes), but it was a mostly pleasant hike.

As soon as I got onto the trail to the first fork, I was greeted with these gorgeous oyster mushrooms that had sprung up. The insects were making quick work of them, but thankfully they weren’t fast enough to completely devour them. I got my photos and stuck around for a few minutes as I noticed they were dropping spores. It was really a neat thing to see. The cycle was present almost entirely before my eyes with tiny oyster mushrooms budding around this cluster, the attraction of insects, the sporulating, and the downed tree acting as the stage for all of it slowly breaking down.

I moved onto another spot I like to scope out just after climbing past the falls where I tend to find some small patches of mushrooms. There were some more red chantrelles out, but I passed on shooting them since I had my RB67 out with me and couldn’t make much of a composition with how small they were. While I was set up, I got stopped and asked about what I was doing. I’m fairly used to at this point. I’m 6’1” and crouched over like a troll waving a light around a small patch on the ground with a camera. I know how weird I look! After chatting about the project and the area, I took this photo that I’m not that attached to. The light isn’t doing anything exactly notable and the mushroom isn’t a strong subject for how I’ve shot it. I’m not sure if I could have changed anything at the time that might have made me like it more, but I felt like I was shooting it just to try it out more than shooting it because I felt a connection to it.

It was a lot of walking after these first few before I found a scene I felt compelled to stop for. There were a lot of the usual turkey tail and white jelly fungus, but I wasn’t about to stop for either of them since they are so abundant (and usually very dead). I found a large snail and decided to take it on a little journey as I turned back to the trail head. By this point, I was very tired and very wet. I walked off trail after seeing some downed trees up a hill in an area I hadn’t stopped in before and I once again overcome with an immediate need to get my camera out.

This was definitely the highlight of the day. The spot was a goldmine.  There were all these small mushrooms budding off the full length of one of the logs and insects (mostly slugs) eating their way across them like a combine harvesting a field with this well traveled snail resting atop the largest bunch as their newly appointed monarch. It sat quite still while I set my camera up and composed my first shot given the new buffet of food. I am in love with how the two photos I took turned out. The wider composition’s light lands so well to highlight the topmost cluster and the closer composition really showcases their translucence and reflectivity.

I finished the roll with these two and loaded up another to get a photo of a lone ghost pipe that was a couple feet away that I’m looking forward to adding to the collection since reconsidering my position in the last post. As a recap, I didn’t take a photo of a group of them since they aren’t mushrooms, but they technically use mushrooms (their mycelium) to leech off nearby trees for to get its nutrients. With the last few photos, I was completely exhausted and made my way a mile and a half or so back out of the forest.  Before I got in my car, I saw a large bank of fog settled up the river and went out on the suspended bridge that spans the Patapsco river for a shot. My heart sank when I realized I had dropped my Reveni spot meter without realizing it. I threw my things in my car and rushed back up the trail. It was getting very dark by this point. I got back to the last spot I stopped in and spent about 10 minutes digging through the small patch of leaves and mud that I photographed the snail from. Then, I moved to where the ghost pipe was. Still nothing. I stood for a couple minutes trying to catch my breath and just before I gave up, I looked down and just under my feet was the spot meter.

All’s well that ends well.

There’s no photo outing this weekend, but I’ll be back out next weekend trying out some new gear and paying better attention to my gear since this was the second week of issues. As always, hit me up on Twitter if you’d like to chat! I’d love to hear your thoughts on the photos and the project at large.

“All Fungi are edible. Some fungi are only edible once.”

—Terry Pratchett

It’s been a slightly stressful week. I had a rough several days early last week that persisted through Friday with back and leg pain, and I also had appointments with the VA for medical claims related to those issues which left me anxious the entire week. On top of that, I start a new job this week after being out of work since separating from the Navy in December. So after stressing then resting all week and through the weekend, I pulled myself out of bed and headed to Patapsco Valley state park for another round of mushroom photos along the Cascade Falls trail.

I tried to go in the afternoon yesterday, but the holiday has everyone flooding to the parks and they were closed due to capacity. Today, I headed out an hour early and got there about half an hour before they opened. Still, I underestimated the amount of people that would be at the park and had another half hour wait in traffic to enter Patapsco. Already, the park was almost entirely filled, and I thought I was going to have to head home once again. Thankfully, I found a single parking space near the trail and started my hike.

If only that were the only headache for the day. About a mile in, I found a patch of red chantrelles. They look very similar to the small chantrelles that I found about a half mile away a few weeks ago, but the color is noticeably deeper red.

After 10 shots, I couldn’t advance the film any further and immediately knew I jammed it. My heart sank. I almost walked out of the woods, but I figured I had gone through the trouble and leaving wouldn’t make it better. I opened the film back, tore the now useless film away from the canister, removed the jam, and reloaded the remaining film. After reshooting a few compositions, I continued on down the trail.

Moving into July, I’m starting to see new mushrooms pop up at the places I heavily frequented in June. Watching the woods change so much makes every trip out new in a way. When I was in Georgia, I hiked and ran the same trails for nearly eight years without seeing much of a difference outside of seasonal rotations. It’s probably because I wasn’t looking, but I’m choosing to ignore that.

At one of my regular spots located at the junction point just beyond the titular Cascade Falls, I came across this snail hanging around some currently unidentified polypores and set up for a shot. I spent a solid 15-20 minutes waiting for it to crawl into position (and gently coaxed it to not take off before I could get my light where I wanted it) before firing off several photos.

A couple minutes further down the trail, I found some “mushroom adjacent” plants called Ghost Pipes. While walking, I saw a bright bushel of white stems jutting from the ground just off the trail and thought they were mushrooms. When I got closer, I realized what they were and became excited. While they aren’t mushrooms, they are parasitic plants that use mushrooms to get nutrients from neighboring trees. Because they weren’t true mushrooms, I decided not to snap a photo for the project and kept walking.

About a mile more down the trail with no mushroom sightings worth attempting a photo for on such a short roll, I decided to turn around early. On my way back I came across a large, old Artist’s Conk. With it, I finished the hike and headed home a bit happier that I was able to find some new stuff and take some photos after a week of stress and pain.