Mushrooms, Redwood Log. Muir Woods National Monument, California. December 16, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Winter mushrooms grow on a redwood log at Muir Woods National Monument.
Yesterday I decided to squeeze in a quick shoot in the Muir Woods area on a relatively nice day before what promises to be a week of substantial rain. So I was on the road early, stopping at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge to photograph the San Francisco Bay at sunrise before continuing on to Muir Woods. I arrived pretty early – I know I’m there early when I get the very first parking space closest to the entrance!
This is a beautiful time of year in the redwood forest, but there seems to be a smaller number of visitors. I suppose the wetness may keep them away – there is mud and water everywhere – and not everyone is willing to deal with the cold. The main grove at Muir Woods sits in the bottom of a canyon that doesn’t get a whole lot of sun this time of year, especially very early and late in the day. Combine wet with cold and low light… and you can understand why it was a fairly quiet morning there, with only a few other people wandering about.
I know that winter is the mushroom season in places like this, but I was very surprised by the number of mushrooms growing there yesterday and my the astonishing variety of types. There were the large curving brown ones (sorry, I’m not a mushroom ID expert, to say the least!) clustered in the upper area of this shot, the brightly colored yellow ones, tiny white ones, and many other shapes and colors and textures. I wish that I could have stayed longer to photograph more of them, but I think I’ll try to return after the current cycle of storms ends.
I’ll add a couple of photographic observations here, too. First, this is another shot that demonstrates, I think, the usefulness of the 70-200mm zoom lens. Working here at close to minimum focus distance, the longer focal length gave me a bit of working room and still provided a nice background blur. Second, the redwood forest is a very dark place! I don’t know how you could shoot these subjects handheld – this shot used a 6 second exposure!
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John, thanks for that info. I’ve only paid cursory attention to mushrooms in the past, this despite the fact that I have years and years of experience hiking in these areas. I was taken completely by surprise by the number of mushrooms I spotted on this visit to Muir Woods. Once I spent the time to photograph this group, I started looking more carefully for such things and I started seeing them everywhere, and in an astonishing variety of forms and colors.
It is amazing to think that those rounded yellow mushrooms could turn into those brown, earthy, capped mushrooms! And thanks for the ID – identifying vegetation is a weakness of mine. (The truth is that I’m perhaps not a namer of things. I often know a plant very well by appearance, location, season in which it appears, and so forth – but I have no idea what to call it!)
Dan
Hi, Dan. It’s been a great year for shrooms, for sure. More than I can remember seeing in a long time. FWIW, your brown mushrooms above are probably just very aged versions of the little yellow ones just starting out — a common species called Sulfur Tuft. It often grows in large, conspicuous and beautiful aggregations.
Thanks, David, I very much appreciate the comments. :-)
As I’m sure you know, the “sharpness” issue in a photograph like this one is not quite as simple as it might seem. I wanted the background to be out of focus so that it would not compete for attention with the mushrooms in the foreground and in order to create more of a sense of depth. The longer lens helped to create this effect… but it also made it a bit tricky to get just the right depth of field so that the mushrooms, which are obviously not all in the same plane, would be in focus. (I have a couple of other “takes” on this scene in which I experimented with somewhat different DOF.
This morning was just naturally a wonderful one for what you described as the “mood and wetness” of the rainforest. As I’m sure you know, everything was moist and green. It wasn’t raining – hadn’t been for a few days – and the fog was dissipating, but the plant life was everywhere thriving on the very wet conditions. Deep in the shade of this redwood grove in a valley and at this relatively early hour, the light was dim and it was quiet.
Dan
There’s a beautiful variety of nature’s magic in this image. A great photograph, and very sharp, except for the background of course. You used the right lens, even if it wasn’t bought specifically for sharpness. I remember hunting mushrooms in the Redwoods way back when I was in college and everything seemed either out of focus or overly focused, but that’s a different sort of unsharp mask… Seriously though, this is a wonderful image that captures the mood and wetness of America’s rainforest.