Rise and Fall in Fall

Our camera club had planned a trip to an ancient deciduous forest sometime ago that was to take place this weekend. The goal was to photograph toadstools and/or fungi, which should be available in great numbers and varieties. Much to our surprise, most trees still featured green leaves instead of the explosion of warm hues we had expected. Even worse, it appeared the fungus season has now officially been closed! We spent the better part of the day searching for subjects to photograph. Everywhere we looked, we found traces of what used to be toadstools and fungi.


What once had been all kinds of beautiful shapes and colors, now were only slimy, black remnants. The best we could find were a few decaying individuals, so those were the ones that feature in the few images I shot. As they certainly did not look their best, I once again reverted to a B&W conversion. With a pinkish toadstool and a greenish foreground,  the B&W would become a contrasty one if I used a red or green filter during the conversion. The red filter yielded the best result in my opinion. With the fungi gone, it's time for a new project. I have several ideas in mind, let's see which ones are the most promising.

Decaying fungus; Canon 1D Mark III w. 150/2.8 macro; 1/50s at F2.8 and ISO200; tripod.

Great Blue Villain

A good friend told me about a small body of shallow water, that appeared to be a good spot for waders. He had shown me some wonderful images of Green Sandpipers and offered me the opportunity to give it a shot. Since the fungi are currently in bad shape (we need rain!), that was an offer I could not resist. So I went over and spent several hours lying on the cold and wet ground, peering through a small hole in a screen made of reeds. The first two hours went by with only a Common Moorhen foraging amidst a distant reedbed. The light was not particularly beautiful, so not a scene worthy to photograph.

Then all out of a sudden came a Great Blue Heron, that landed about 4 meters from my position. Somehow it sensed my presence and flew off to the (not so) far shore within seconds. It stayed there for the next hour, and I could photograph it searching for a kill in all kinds of positions. A bit far away, but because there was hardly any wind, the reflections were very nice and then it pays to have the subject (which is now effectively double the size) a bit smaller in the frame. I liked this photograph best, in which the Heron to me resembles a true villain, thinking about its next bad move and next kill to make. Because the heron's blueish colors contrast heavily with the yellows and greens of the reeds, I knew I could create a very nice and contrasty B&W version. It looks good in color too, but the B&W version provides a dark atmosphere that suits the villain much better.

Oh: no Sandpipers or other waders showed up, though I did hear the characteristic calls of birds common to reedbeds.

Great Blue Heron; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS and 1.4x; 1/125s at F5.6 and ISO200; beanbag from ground.

Unsharp Mask

Over the last few weeks, I found lots and lots of toadstools and fungi. They were everywhere and hard to be missed. Last weekend, I finally decided to focus my attention on the fungi and so I went to my favorite nearby fungal forest. You can imagine I was unhappily surprised when it appeared that there were not as many fungi as I had expected. And the few I could find were in a miserable state of being, of course due to the relatively long period of drought and the high autumn temperatures we have seen here lately. But in the end, you often only need a fungus or two to keep you occupied for at least a few hours.

I came across this happy couple of Porcelain Fungi (Oudemansiella mucida, Porseleinzwam) on (of course) a rotting beech tree branch. I spent three full hours on my belly, turning around in the wet soil and rotting leaves and tried all kinds of angles, lenses and illuminations. When I left the scene, my back, shoulders and neck hurt, my hands itched from the bites of mosquitos and numerous other bugs and my clothes smelled like an autumn forest floor (no surprise). Lesson learnt: always bring the anglefinder!

I liked this -almost cartoonish- representation of the scene best, which was achieved by focussing manually just behind the fungi.

Porcelain Fungi; Canon 1D Mark III w. 150/2.8 macro; 1/13s at F2.8 and ISO100; tripod.

Stuck in a Rut

The term stuck in a rut can be used figuratively to refer to a situation in which, as time progresses, the situation is unable to be changed or steered in a desired way (Wikipedia).

When a photographer is stuck in a rut, it usually means he or she produces the same (kind of) images again and again, is unable to look at subjects in a new and fresh way and is unable to create creative and refreshing images. Been there, done that, many times actually, and will be there again, I'm sure.


But this time, it's not me who's stuck in a rut, it's the Red Deer (Cervus elaphus, Edelhert). As Wikipedia puts it: the rut is the mating season of ruminant animals such as deer, sheep, elk, moose, caribou, ibex, goats, pronghorn and Asian and African antelope. During the rut (also known as the rutting period, and in sheep sometimes as tupping), males often rub their antlers or horns on trees or shrubs, fight with each other, wallow in mud or dust, and herd estrus females together.
 
In the Netherlands, the Red Deer rut can only be witnessed in two places: the Veluwe and the Oostvaardersplassen. The latter being not very accessible and the former being on the way to our holiday address, we visited the Veluwe for an afternoon to watch the spectacle unfold. It truly was a spectacle, with several stags grunting their hearts out and gathering their harem of hinds (as seen in the panned image above).

What made the experience a bit less overwhelming and even zoo-like, were both the well-timed appeareance of a park ranger with a bucket full of apples and other deer goodies, and the presence of about 400 other wildlife enthousiasts along the short stretch of road. There must have been at least 1 million euros worth of camera gear pointed towards the star of the show, a large stag. I'll call him the Million Dollar Stag from now on.

Red Deer Stag; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS and 1.4x; 1/13s at F16 and ISO100; tripod.