Californian photographer brilliantly captures images of Fungi

by The REJIGIT Blog


San Anselmo (a town in Marin County, California) based photographer Alison Pollack captures the beauty of Fungi and Myxomycetes (slime molds) via focus stacked and macro photographic images of the mysterious Mycological underworld in the northern California region.

Trichia decipiens

In Alison’s words via her Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/marin_mushrooms/ ) “A little technical info for those of you who might be interested: with extreme macro, you are taking a photo at high magnification, with the lens very very close to the subject. Under those conditions, and with a wide aperture setting to maximize sharpness, the portion of the subject that is in focus is less than 0.05mm. To get a photo of the entire fruiting body in focus, I use a technique called focus stacking. My camera is mounted on a finely tuned rail, and the camera is moved only 0.01mm between each photo. Yes folks, that is only 1 hundredth of a millimeter movement between each shot! For this photo (Trichia decipiens), I took 201 individual images, which were then “stacked” with computer software that combines the most in-focus portions of each of the 201 individual images into a composite image”.

Chlorociboria aeruginascens

Ascocoryne sarcoides & Trichia

Crepidotus mollis

Didymium squamulosum

Leocarpus fragilis

Hericium erinaceus

Physarum

Physarum viride

Tyromyces chioneus