Red and White Mushroom in the grass

An Amanita muscaria, commonly known as the fly agaric or fly amanita [*] in the grounds of Blarney Castle yesterday. It’s a poisonous mushroom found throughout temperate and boreal regions of the Northern Hemisphere, according to Wikipedia.

It’s also poisonous, but these days death from ingestion is rare. It has psychoactive uses too, and it’s eaten in various places.

Thanks Catherine for letting me know where these mushrooms were. She posted a nice photo of a mushroom from there recently! The nice thing about these mushrooms is that they are quite large, so you don’t really need a macro lens to get a photo like this of them.


Apertureƒ/6.3
CameraILCE-7M3
Focal length194mm
ISO500
Shutter speed1/200s

Tiny Mushroom

Here’s one of my attempts at a mushroom photo, focus stacked from 4 roughly the same images.

This sort of photography is really hard isn’t it? You have to get down really low which is a problem itself if you don’t have a tripod to suit. An extension tube is a requirement as I don’t have a macro lens, and then trying to manually focus on the different parts of the mushroom is a challenge.

The focus assist in my camera really helped there. It shows dancing dots where the image is focused but even at f/14 it wasn’t enough to encompass the entire mushroom from front to back. Tap to zoom paid off a few times as it blows up the image to help focusing.

It was fascinating to see the focus dots move like a wave through the scene as I zoomed in and out. Yes, zooming in and out moved the focus point significantly! Significantly here means a few centimetres. Everything is small scale here.


Apertureƒ/14
CameraILCE-7M3
Focal length105mm
ISO100
Shutter speed2.5s

Mushrooms in the roots

Mushrooms grow from the roots of a tree in Fitzgerald’s Park, Cork. I just loved the colour and texture of the fungus, especially in the light of the sunset behind me.

Aperture ƒ/8
Camera Canon EOS 20D
Focal length 10mm
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/125s