Although Amanita Flavoconia in Europe is relatively benign (and called Amanita Muscaria I believe), the American variety is not. The ones here in the eastern part of the US are yellow instead of red and contain more toxins than hallucinogenic properties in almost the reverse proportions of the European variety. While the red, European variety may be a nice way to become a Viking Berserker, the American variety is most likely to make you really, really sick. It probably won’t kill you like its cousins the Destroying Angels, but it will make you wish you were dead.
But. It is so gorgeous that I can’t help myself. So I got down and got in close. I think the white portion is a single gill now exposed to the world.
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Too weird? It’s a very close look at a split in the cap of one of these beauties.
Technical Details
Tripod and natural light
3 sessions of focus bracketing with different starting points of focus
Lightroom for initial work to smooth tonalities and add some texture and sharpening. No cropping
Zerene to stack 87 shots - used slabbing to make 10 PMax images and then stacked those into another PMax image that didn’t need too much retouching. Photoshop to clean up some stacking artifacts and run a clarity action restricted to the lighter yellow colors. Did some burning to even out the background.
A very intriguing image and composition! Sounds like a heroic stacking job. It almost looks like a cheesecake or some exotic confection. Wonderful yellows! Do you have a special action for isolating and taming them? Flat yellows can be a common problem. I never thought about trying Clarity limited by color.
Hey Kris! First, shame on your for reminding me of cheesecake. Second, killer shot! (pun intended) I really like the angle and perspective of your composition. It makes me explore the scene more. Definitely not too weird. You’re really improving!
Glad it isn’t too odd. I originally approached this and a couple other specimens with the idea of doing standard ‘portraits’ if you will, but changed my mind for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve done it before as have countless others, who needs another amanita picture? Second, the cap is really the most interesting part of them when they’re fully fruited, so why not find what’s the most interesting thing about the most interesting part? With this one it was the split, for sure. I got lucky again because it was growing on a little hillock and I could position the lens directly in line with the wedge cut out.
So…in terms of restricting the clarity action - I use the TK8 panel to do it all. First I run a clarity action with it and I think I set it to about 12 pixels or so. Maybe 15. Then I ran a color mask, selecting the light yellow parts and it pretty much isolated them so I didn’t have to finesse the mask. Then I placed the mask on the clarity layer, thus restricting clarity to only the yellows and in varying amounts depending on how deep the yellow color went. Deeper got less so that the warts would be really crisp and full of nice detail and contrast. The warts are remnants of the universal veil surrounding the mushroom when it’s still underground, it’s called an egg.
Dave Kelly’s YouTube channel may help, especially, at first, his full edit videos. He does some that go over certain groups features, too, like recently about color cloning v. add color - two different actions in the panel. I put a link and a review in our Resources section -
Thanks @David_Bostock - I may not have needed so many in retrospect, but I often shoot with the lens nearly wide open and get in habits that more align with that aspect. For f/5.6, I probably didn’t need so many, but I wanted to be sure I got it all. Better to have more images than you need than not enough. The same day I missed a critical bit of a coral fungus in a stack and scrapped the whole set of shots because of it.
Thanks @Mark_Seaver - it was a capital day for mushroom photography that’s for sure. I thought this would make a nice addition to my obsessive collection. There are only the remains of one of its deadly cousins in the yard - yesterday it was not quite fully fruited, but close; partial veil still intact. Nice ferny backdrop. Today it is in pieces, mostly eaten. Luckily I worked with it for a while and hope I got a decent photo in the end.
Kris, this is really neat. It does look like food of some sort. Good thing I just ate lunch, or I might be getting hungry. Great composition, color and details.
