The story behind... #01

Initially, I never intended to take this picture. Now, as most of the time I don't go out of the house thinking "let me go and photograph a mushroom today", this statement might need some explaining.

6th January, 2018

This evening - different from normally - I actually went out with a plan to photograph something specific: the deer which can be found near my hometown. As this is quite a well known spot, and the deer are usually most active around dusk (the time I was there), there were just loads of people; including kids trying to feed the deer. While I was trying to get a picture of the deer seemingly in the wild, as opposed to them being inside a defined space (which, of course, they are), the children luring the deer closer to the fences were not particularly helping me out. I decided that I would wait for a little while and hope that as time passed by, the children would start to go home; giving me the chance to take my imagined photos. This period of waiting and wandering around the deer, desperately looking for other things to photograph in the meantime, was the moment I came across these mushrooms.

As I mentioned, it was around dusk at the time, so the cars had started to turn on their headlights. This, and the fact that I had just bought a lens which should give me a really beautiful blurry backgrounds and "bokeh lights" (a 50mm f1.8, for anyone interested in photography), promted me to try and take this picture. In the end, it took me a good couple of tries to get it to where I wanted it to be: a car in the background providing the bokeh lights and nothing else in the picture sharp but the mushroom up front. This first point was just a matter of timing it right, waiting for a car to enter the roundabout in the distance, and take the picture as it was leaving. The second requirement, however, proved to be a little more difficult, as a had to keep my camera still just a few centimeters above the ground, and needed a fairly long shutter time (again, due to the time I was shooting and the fading daylight).

Now, looking back on the picture, I still wish that car on the right-hand side had driven just a little faster and would have been in the frame completely. But, as a photograph taken as a means to kill time and get away from the children feeding the deer, I'm actually really pleased with it.