November 14, 2004
It's daring you to screw with it
I replaced the camelback's water bladder with camera gear, wrapped a ten pound tripod in a suffocating chokehold around me, and biked back to the mysterious orange mushrooms I tried to capture yesterday.
Glad to see they hadn't been trampled since yesterday (in fact, I couldn't even see any signs of anyone having passed since I'd been through), I got to work.
Tripod Failings
I insisted on the tripod so that I could get sharp photos. These tiny mushrooms are no more than 4cm tall and the cap is perhaps 1.5cm diameter. When I flattened my tripod out as low as it could go, I discovered it could only get the mount maybe a foot off the ground (there is a center post to the tripod mount that hits the ground. Therefore I was getting photos, although close, at a weird 45-degree angle to the cap. They weren't very nice. There is a way to hang the camera upside down from that center post, but it seemed awkward and would have physical limitations as well. Looking at the Manfrotto tripod $ite, it $eem$ there i$ better technology for low-level tripod$ now.
So even though I knew the answer, I tried hand-holding. The photos were just as blurry as I expected. It's laughable to think I can hold steady a one second exposure.
Plan B: The Flash
So if the tripod isn't feasible for the views I want, and I can't hold steady in ambient light, I guess I can try the flash. I try to avoid this because I basically don't know how to use the flash for much more than fill, and definitely not controlling it as a tame component.
But, guess what, I made it work! The answer? You set the camera to Manual - I specify both the aperture and shutter speed. So I set something sanely hand-holdable... say 1/50 or 1/100 and set an aperture that gives me a reasonable depth of field f/9. Now shoot that, you get a photo that's practically pitch black because there is nowhere near enough light. That's where the flash comes in. Hit the FEL button on the camera, it sends out a burst of light, and figures out how much flash it needs to expend in order to make my f/9 1/50 photo expose satisfactorily. It works!
The flash work could be nicer (off-camera flash, diffused, etc) but at least it works now and I can get the photo I want.
I took quite a few of these photos, but have only included a single untouched one. I'm spending my efforts making some prints that you can only enjoy if you visit me.
So then, the obvious question: What the hell is this thing?
Beats me. I couldn't find any field guides to identifying mushrooms in Singapore or Malaysia. I tried the very cool mushroom identity expert system on http://www.agarics.org/Index.jsp but it seems to be European or North American-centric, so it didn't help. Hopefully someone will come along with an idea of what it is. I just know one thing, organisms don't live in the dark green Singapore jungle wearing a festive traffic-cone orange unless they are very confident of being able to take care of themselves.