Rodney Campbell's Blog

I spent an afternoon with a handful of other keen photographers at Blackheath in the rainforest with macro lenses equipped along with various strobes and light modifiers shooting all manner of fungi. This was my first time ever shooting fungi or in fact shooting macro nature using speedlights so it was a fun learning experience – I hope you like the results. I really hadn’t realised how tiny some of these things were 🙂

I also learnt about shooting past f/16 🙂

Most of the shots were taken with the camera in Manual mode set to the relevant aperture and a shutter speed of 1/200th of a second. For light I was mostly just using my speedlight (SB-600) zoomed out to the widest setting (in my case 24mm) with just a simple stofen omnibounce on the front with the flash sitting on the camera hotshoe. Some of the shots were taken with further light diffusion – e.g. using a Gary Fong style dome or a simple popout circular diffuser panel.

Note: These images (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay gallery viewer.

NIKON D90 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/200 sec at f / 32, ISO 200

What isn’t immediately apparent from these images is just how small these fungi are – I had no idea we were searching for things this tiny in the forest – they are practically impossible to notice with the naked eye – it was lucky we had someone who was an experienced fungi shooter 🙂

The orange topped ones below were perhaps only 1 or 2 mm across the cap and in the last shot below (the last shot of the day) the larger of the shrooms here was probably one of the largest of the day and it would easily be less than 1cm across!

NIKON D90 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/200 sec at f / 22, ISO 200

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NIKON D90 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/200 sec at f / 25, ISO 200

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NIKON D90 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/200 sec at f / 40, ISO 200

This last shot was taken at an extremely small aperture (f/57) using the on camera flash as a commander through a flash diffuser triggering two remote Nikon flashes (an SB-600 close on the right with a Gary Fong style attachment and an SB-800 further away to the left).

NIKON D90 + 90.0 mm f/2.8 @ 90 mm, 1/200 sec at f / 57, ISO 200

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