Fungus Coprinus Micaceus

This has been a fine weekend weather-wise and brilliant for fungi. It started of on Saturday with me looking for a couple of fungi I noticed when coming home from work in the evening - they caught in the car headlamp beams.

By Saturday they were well past their best, but looking around I saw many of them nearby at the base of a rotting tree stump. I took several photographs of these, two of which are shown below. I then looked around and saw some different ones growing through the gravel.

Then I had a look at the pile of old rotting logs. Whilst I was taking some pictures of some growing on the logs, my wife came to watch. She noticed some blue on the underside of a log. Lifting this showed a fungus, or mould, that I had not seen before. It was a deep navy blue touching onto violet. An incredible colour. I will show this in another posting, along with many more of those I have photographed.

Coprinus Micaceus (I am reasonably confident on the name of this one as there appears to be few others to confuse it with!)

Matching the tones

In the last post I discussed and showed the new banner images that I was proposing to use for the re-vamp of my website. I was reasonably satisfied with what I did. For the second stage I wanted to base the colour scheme of each page on the colours in the image on that page.

I used the colour picker in Photoshop Elements to select appropriate tones to use. I wanted 3 major tones: a mid-tone for the background, a lighter tone for the header/footer background and a very pale tone for the background of the text. Additionally, the colour of the text on the vertical banner on the top left had to match the background.

Some worked, some didn't, some were just about OK...

For some I will rework the tones in a different manner. Rather than selecting an individual tone from the image, in Photoshop I will select all, or most, of the image and use an 'averaging blur' to get the overall tone. I will then try using lighter or darker versions of this tone, or complementary colours to rebuild the page style.

Below I show my results with some comments on why I think they worked or didn't - your comments would be appreciated.

1) May Blossom and green.
This was the first one I did and it seems to work quite well - I am satisfied with this.



2) Sandy sky.
This sort of works - I like the image, but I am not sure of the tones used. As the picture was posterised to a few tones, this limited the palette available.



3) Dusky Pink
I admit I had problems picking appropriate values from this posterised banner. At first I thought it was OK, then ugh!, now I am not so sure...



4) Ice blue
Does it work? I think the selected colour is not too far away from the average, ignoring the very dark band. Again I am not sure.



5) Dragon Green
This was not posterised but again I had trouble picking out individual tones. The green was selected from the foliage, and the pale greyish was from the droplets on the dragonfly. I think this one might benefit from averaging the tones.



6) Red leaf
The red tone came from averaging the middle as I could not get a suitable tone from the colour picker. The very pale pink for the text background came from the main vein of the leaf.


7) Greys
I used just the one tone. I think the main background could do with being darker.


8) Orange and yellow.
My excuse was that it was getting late and I was tiring... The tones did come out of the posterised image.



9) Sky Blue.

I must have been very tired at this point!



These last two are what I shall work on first!

Banner images for website

I am in the process of redesigning my website. For this I wanted new banner logos across the top of the web pages - in fact I wanted a set of them. The 'specification' was that the image must be suitable for a long narrow format, suitable for the text to be placed on each side. Where possible, the same colour was required for the image.

I played with lots of ideas in Photoshop Elements and came up with two sets of ideas. The first set were posterised to reduce the colour palette to as fewer tones as the image would stand.

This is the posterised set:














This is the 'not posterised' set.







You will notice that for some of the text, I have had to put a thin outline around the text to make it stand out.

This exercise taught me a lot about Photoshop: - Different text effects, Shadow effects (although I did not use any), and Reducing the opacity of the text to let the underlying image show through. A useful exercise.

Autumn colours

I have noticed the colour of the leaves this autumn is different to that of last year. I remember last year the colours were more red and golden. This year the colours appear to be more yellow and brown.

However the quality of the light makes a difference, especially the early morning sunlight. Today was a fine sunny morning, although the clouds soon started bubbling up. I did manage to get a few pictures before the chores (letting out and feeding the chickens and ducks) and before the clouds covered the sun.

This first picture shows the beech trees and hedging at the side of one of our fields. You can see the yellows and browns. I don't pretend these are 'artistic' pictures - I took them quickly to demonstrate the colours.



This second picture is a close-up of some beech leaves. They are wet from the overnight rain and the sun is shining directly on them. They have taken on this beautiful copper tone.



Magic!

Cramp Balls fungus

I am gradually working my way through my collection of fungus photographs, trying to sort, identify and catalogue them. It appears that the two fungi I provisionally identified last week as Panther Cap may be a similar species and that the whole set may be of three species - I need some help!

I have put another, smaller, set of photographs in the gallery of another fungus, one of which I reproduce below:


This I believe to be Daldinia concentrica which appears to have a number of names including: Cramp Balls (an old cure for cramp!) and King Alfred's Cakes (due to the burnt look of them).

Autumn leaf

We have had some good weather this week. Most days have been fine and often clear. The start of the days have been variable though, from frost and fog to rain and perfectly clear skies.

I have managed to get out on occasions to take advantage of these early morning conditions. The picture below is one taken of a leaf on a tree, almost ready to fall. I took a number of photographs of this leaf in silhouette. I liked the curve of the leaf, the angle it formed, and the water forming a drop at the tip. Some pictures include an outline of the sun in the hazy sky.

What I enjoyed was taking a set of photographs that had a feel of autumn about them - I may publish more at a later date.

Candlesnuff fungus

I make no apologies about doing more on fungi - this has been a brilliant autumn for these on our smallholding. I have enough material to keep going beyond Christmas!

The one I am featuring today is the Candlesnuff fungus Xylaria Hypoxylon. I first saw this on a tree stump 2 years ago and took a few photos with my then new digital compact. I did not get any photographs last year, and this year I thought I had missed the best - there were only a few on some rotting tree stumps.

Then, whilst taking some pictures of other fungus on some old logs, I found lots of clumps of this fungi on a small log - this was the most I have seen on one place. The picture below is one example. I have put a selection of photographs in the fungi section of the environment gallery.

Fungi Foray

Last Sunday was the day after I returned from my week away in the east of England. That day the weather was perfect for some close up photography - bright but hazy sun and no wind. As for subjects, we had loads of different fungi growing in the garden - some that I hadn't seen before.

So I spent the greater part of the day crawling around the garden and the lawn taking photographs. For most I used my macro lens, but for others I used my standard zoom. I now have another load of fungus pictures to sort and catalogue.

Part of the problem is that I am not a fungus expert, so rely on my field guides. Even then, some are not listed. So, if anyone can help identify those I publish - please let me know!

Here are some examples of those photographed.

This one I believe to be one of the Coral fungi:



These remind me of 'Big Ears' house in the Noddy stories! I think it is a Panther Cap. If so, it is a very poisonous type and we have dozens.



These three are quite tiny, about 1cm across:



Talking of fungi, I have placed another set of photographs in the Fungi section of the Environment Gallery. I have tentatively identified them as a Bolete - 'Leccinum aurantiacum' due to the fact that they are growing near Poplar trees.