G'day, welcome back to my Blog. This morning I headed out to the Australian Botanical Gardens, Mount Annan, to see if I can get this weeks Mushroom shot and add to my collection of bird shots form there. Mushrooms are getting harder to find there with the lack of rain over the past few months in this part of Sydney, but there are still a few patch's that show results each week. This week was no exception I found three separate sites in the connections garden that had little mushrooms growing. So plenty to choose from, I picked my site and went to work, as usual I used my Canon 60D with Canon 100m F2,8 L Macro lens with lens hood fitted, not filters, the len hood protects the lens on this one, the camera is sat on the ground and leveled up with any stray bark that's laying around, I set up two speedlites both as close to the mushroom as I can with out being in the frame and drop the power down so as not to blow out the shot, the Camera and speedlites are all fitted with Yongnuo YN-622C wireless radio triggers, that's the box you can see mounted on top of the camera on the hot shoe.

I set the aperture for something around F22 or greater to try and pick up some depth of field as shooting this close you loose a lot of the depth of field and often between the front of the mushroom and stem you loose the focus. I then up the drop the shutter speed down till I can see the mushroom in the live view LCD, the 60D has the swivel LCD so great for when the cameras on the ground, I use the magnification on the live view to zoom in and then manually focus on the area I want sharpest. once happy I then increase the shutter speed so this usually means the screen goes black as I usually shoot around 200th of a second and use the flash to add the light this gives the dark feel to the shots and adds the light where I want, I usually take several shots with the flashes moved around different angels to see what gives the best light and shadow Ill then change the shutter speed to vary the light effects and power on the flashes to give me something I like, todays shots finished up at 1/50th of a second f32 and ISO 100 to reduce the noise as much as possible. From the shot you will see the set up I used today, also visible is a small spray bottle which I use to give the mushrooms a light spray of water this usually brings out the colours in them and also gives some interesting water drops at times, also visible is the Infrared remote I use to fire the camera so I don't disturb the set up when shooting.

Once done the next step is to head home and do some quick lightroom work on the shoot, I'll cover this in a future blog, my light room workflow.

The bird shots fro the week were not so great got a few but nothing that I'm excited about this week, better luck next time, I guess.

Thanks for dropping by and hope to see you again soon, I'll try and put out two blog posts a week the mid week will be more gear orientated and the weekend one more on how I got a shot, Hope its of use. I'm still learning each week so please don't take this as an expert guide just how I got the shot and results I got for the week.

Glenn.

G'day before we start in to the photography details of my blog, let’s start by introducing myself to you all. By trade I'm a mechanical draughtsman, having completed a four year apprenticeship in Mechanical draughting in a Sydney dockyard. After five years working in a dockyard I moved on, took 7 months off, and spend 7 months in in Europe mainly based in Dublin Ireland where my wife comes from. During my time in Ireland I spend most of it with my Minolta X 700 SLR. Upon return back to OZ I found a job as a Mechanical draughtsman in a local Slurry pump company where I stayed for 23 years working my way up within the company till I became the drawing office manager of the development Engineering office, After 23 years there the mining industry hit a few rough patches and the company went through a series of redundancies, I was one of them. This was a great benefit to my photography as I had already picked up a new job, knowing the redundancies were coming, so work wise I was Ok, so with a portion of the redundancy package, my local camera shop benefited and so did my camera bag, not my back, 3 new L series canon lenses came my way as well as the 1.4 extender. So all worked out well, work wise, and photography wise, my camera bag is now quite health with 5 L series lens to fill it out, much to my backs delight, but still each weekend I load up and head out, I try and get out each weekend. A lot of the time I head to the local botanical gardens the Australian Botanical Gardens, Mount Annan, these are a great spot for Photography, about 12 km of roads and plenty of spots to stop and walk, either on boardwalks paved paths or dirt tracks depending on what you want, there are over 200 different bird species in the gardens so plenty there for everyone, You'll often find me there Saturday Afternoons as each week I try and add in a shot to the google plus #shroomshotsaturday +ShroomshotSaturday group, a great bunch of people from all round the world. So as you see from this blog I'm not a trained photographer and just play around each year getting better. I can still see room for improvements and hope to be getting better each year so far that seems to be working for me. In future blogs I'll cover some of my gear and also try and come up with some behind the sense blogs of how I get some of the shots and lighting I get. Hope you enjoy the blog and shots, I'll add to them as I get good ones.

Thanks for dropping by, hope to see you here again one day.

Glenn.