Fungi Hunting at Mt Macedon

This week, along with three fellow photographer friends, we had planned to do some Fungi Hunting at Mt Macedon. So, we rugged up against the weather and headed to Sanatorium Lake at Mt Macedon.  Weather-wise it was clear, with only slight showers, but it was 6C at the lake. Cold, cold, cold.  That kind of damp, chilling cold that just seeps into your bones.  Rugged up like Michelin people, we left the car and headed for the lake.  The track was easy to follow, muddy, but not too bad.

On the hunt

We slowly walked along the path, eyes swivelling back and forth, looking for fungi and checking the sides of tree trunks and deadwood lying on the ground. When we found one, we noticed that there would be others in the immediate area. Never saw a single one by itself.  We went off the path into the scrub in several areas where we spotted them. Some were just too hard to photograph either because they were inaccessible, way up a tree, or the tree was on such a slope that we needed to be mountain goats to position the tripods and shoot them.

Focus Stacking

I was shooting with the Olympus OMD EM1 Mark II, giving the new 60mm Macro its first real run, and trying out Focus Stacking for the first time on the Olympus, which worked fantastically!  I just love it; it creates eight images at different focal lengths, then merges them in-camera into a single image (jpeg) that’s (theoretically) sharp front to back.  Considering these were taken on a macro, which usually has a very narrow depth of field, it worked great.  I can’t wait to try it on the 12-40 for landscapes.  You end up with eight jpegs, 8 RAW and the blended jpeg. As I prefer to work with RAW files,  I deleted the jpegs when I downloaded them to the computer and then blended the RAW files in Photoshop.  

Fungi Hunting at Mt Macedon
Sanatorium Lake

By around 1.30 pm – hungry and chilled to the bone, we headed back to the car, grabbed our picnic lunch and headed to one of the picnic tables. We quickly ate our lunch and then dived back to the warmth of the car for the trip home.  We had a fabulous morning, we all got a great crop of images, but all need warmer winter gear 😉

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