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A Photo Essay About Mushrooms
Come walk with me and look at mushrooms in the forest
It’s April and that means that mushroom season is almost upon us. I love taking walks along the wooded trails near my home in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley. There’s something soul-nourishing about forest bathing, the practice of immersing yourself in the forest and slowing down.
I always bring my camera on my walks. At first, it was because I’d hoped to capture photos of birds. But unless you’re at the forest’s edge or near a water source, it’s hard to capture pictures of birds when you’re in the woods, especially when the leaves fill in and birds hide way up in the canopy.
My camera isn’t really good at capturing birds even in the best of conditions. It’s an entry-level DSLR camera with a 70–300 mm lens. What that means is that if the bird is more than about 15 feet away and it’s smaller than, say, your average North American Blue Jay, the shot tends to be fuzzy or grainy or both.
In 2021, after accruing several thousand blurry photos of birds over the course of three years, I decided to try my hand at taking photos of stuff that doesn’t fly away when you point a camera at it. Each time I took a walk, I gave myself a new assignment— photograph the way the light hits a fern on the forest floor, capture an interesting stand of…
