Onegav

Sometimes, you just get lucky! I often struggle to get a nice composition that I’m happy with in the woodlands. They’re often busy scenes, with leaves, branches, twigs, trees, bushes, and all sorts going on in a mass of green and brown shades. I find the scene can often just look really busy, without much form.

So today, I planned to use my 50mm wide open to isolate some subjects from the busy backgrounds. Ideally, I wanted to use some fungi as my subject.

As I entered the woodlands near our home, mostly watching my step as the ground was mega muddy after all the recent rain, I hadn’t gone five minutes before I came across the biggest growth of fungi I have ever seen!!

Hows that for good luck! I couldn’t believe it, it was growing in a narrow clearing, with the sun just poking through a gap in the dense cloud shining on it, and although its location made for a difficult composition, I felt blessed at finding something so spectacular.

A difficult compositon, yes, but just look at that dappled light hitting the side of the tree and some of the fungi. It was like something out of a rain forest, not something from the North West of England.

I tried to get as much of the tree, and fungi in as I could, along with some of the woodland to make a compositon, and for that I used my 18-55mm, as I needed the extra width, that I wouldn’t get with my 50mm prime lens.

I’ve included this image above with my hand in the frame, just to give you some idea of the scale this thing was on!!

Then, I switched to the 50mm…..

I know the shots with the 50mm don’t portray the scale the same, but I really like them, they’re intimate and “other worldly”. The shallow depth of field really helps to isolate the subject too, which is just what I think I need for these woodland scenes.

I took a couple more shots around the woodland with my 50mm, with these two being my favourites. I really love these tight in, shallow depth of field images, they’re glimpses into a smaller world, that we often overlook.

Composition is of course equally important, and in the image above that lone leaf really makes it, its classic early autum for me, still green, but the fungi is on the march!

Below, the fungi is balanced with the yellowing leaf at the bottom, and both are connected by the somber, almost sinister looking Ivy, wrappig around the fallen tree. So much going on in such a tight and intimate scene; the full cycle of life, no less.

Learnings – well, really I got super lucky today, that cant go down as a learning. Thank you mother nature!

It was interesting switching lenses up though, going from wide, to less wide. It was really also nice to feel that my plan of using a low f stop to give me a shallow depth of field to quieten the busy woodland, worked as I expected.

Nice mini adventure to round off the weekend.