This week I headed out to the Australian Botanical gardens, Mount Annan, only a little less organised than usual. The recent rains here in Sydney gave plenty of new opportunities for Mushroom shots and I managed to get a few bird shots as well., Today I’ll go through a mushroom shot again, starting with the first shot the scene and lighting conditions, form this shot you can see what the light is like and the little mushrooms all waiting to be captured. I usually select a few to take and set up and take a series of shots on each.

The next shot something I don’t normally do I moved the dial to P mode so you can see what the camera would take if it’s up to its own choosing, as you can see it tried to lighted the shot by opening up the aperture and hence lost the depth of field, you also see how washed out the shot looks. This shot is not flash even though the flash fired it wasn’t pointing at the scene so it’s all available light. The day was very overcast and after I get these shots it started to rain so that was the end of the day shooting.

The next image is again straight out of camera no editing, but this time with flash and full manual mode, This is where I found out how unprepared I was today First I realised I didn’t bring my remote trigger for releasing the shutter so I had to be careful each shot not to move the camera, I set it on 2 second timer. The camera was balanced on bark ships to get the framing right, none of today’s images have been cropped the framing is as per the set up.  I then set up my two flashed and when to take the first shot, its then my next problem came to me, one of the flashes had run out of juice so forgot to charge the batteries for it, so luckily I had one working and a have a small piece of aluminium foil in my camera bag I sometimes use as a reflector and today it got a good work out. SO like normal I step down the aperture to maximise my depth of field and bring up the shutter speed to sync speed, this gives the dark to black background and the only light on the mushroom is the side light from the 8” softbox and some reflected back from the aluminium foil. So I try several variations on the lighting angles, and flash power till I get the look I like one with some shadow and highlights and try and get lighting into the gills to bring them out.

The final shot is the one after the processing work in lightroom as explained in last week’s blog, this shot followed the same process, contrast, clarity, darkening the blacks and dropping the highlight a fraction. The final shot here is the one that I put out each week on google plus.

Hope you enjoyed the behind the scenes look again and it hasn’t spoilt the magic for anyone.

Thanks for dropping by.

Glenn