I know, I know! I've already posted a few so why bore you with more? Well, first of all, I went back into the forest yesterday at a slightly different hour which forced me into higher ISO values (800 and 1600) to still shoot handheld. That in turn forced me into a slightly different level of post processing but it also took out the burnt-out sky areas I had the day before. I'm just wondering whether you can see the difference or, if not, just enjoy the pics.
Before you all say how nice and clean the K-5 is at ISO800 and more: yes, it is to a certain extent but I still put this through NeatImage with autoprofiling set per image. The raw processing was still done in batch (my own bash-script) but I used UFraw's Adobe-specific matrix rather than the external K-5 colorprofile I usually apply. This made the images slightly warmer in hue and brings them closer to the embedded thumbnails which, in this case I happened to like.
1. I love this one because the fungi have aged a bit and yellowed. The warm yellow goes better with the background of yellowing leaves in the forest. My only regret is that I wasn't a bit more careful in framing the fungus on the left and the one on the right. Imagine though that this is a fallen tree in its entirety, so you're stepping over and crawling under branches or balancing precariously to get the shot.
2. This one shows of the slimy layer that some insects seem to get caught in. As time goes by, the fungi produce more and more and it tends to ooze off sometimes.
3. Some of them are really huge and on other places you come across these baby ones, entirely different in shape and color. These even grow upside down!
4. I really had to go down on the ground with this one, using an angle finder to be able to get the shot against the tree background. I varied a little in aperture until I found one that a)didn't blow out the background entirely but b)gave enough shallowness in DOF to throw it out of focus and keep the fungus sharp. These are the bigger ones, diameter up to 25-30 centimeters (ca. 10 inches) so it gets complicated to have just enough DOF left to keep the fungus canopy sharp front to back.
5. What can I say more about these little ones with a slightly brownish hue to them and the patches of light from the rapidly sinking sun striking the forest floor behind them?
6. You can see the size if you take into account that these flies are really tiny, no more than a quarter of the size of a regular housefly. These flies seem to have no issues getting stuck in the fungus slime, quite the opposite even.
7. From a structure and composition point this might have been the nicest of the day, be it that I couldn't prevent the sky from burning out. I did do a bracket of 5 and tried to HDR this one both by tonemapping and by exposure merge but I kept going back to the original -1 stop exposure. In the end I gave up trying to overprocess and left it a that. Whether it was the clarity of the colors or the sharpness of detail I don't know - I just love this one.
Post #1 by newmikey
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