After capturing last week’s image of the fog-shrouded trees, I turned around and spotted these three large mushrooms that were growing on the top of a fallen tree. The tallest mushroom probably had a diameter of two inches while the middle mushroom was only slightly smaller. And, they were both in uncommonly good condition.
The hardest part of photographing these mushrooms was how the camera had to be positioned to photograph their undersides. I had to lower the tripod until it was flat on the ground and then angle the camera upward. This position precluded use of the viewfinder and made the LCD screen difficult to see. But, I persevered and framed the scene.
The other issue I needed to consider was depth of field because it was imperative that the mushrooms were completely sharp. With my lens set at 70mm and my camera only about eight inches from the mushrooms, I knew the depth of field would be quite limited. Viewing the scene as best as I could on the LCD screen, I determined that an aperture of f/11 would provide the depth of field necessary to keep the mushrooms sharp. I pressed the shutter button and captured the photograph. When I got back home and opened the file on my computer, I was both somewhat surprised and relieved to see that everything had worked out well.
To process the file, I needed to take a little different approach than I typically use. The mushrooms were the subject of the photograph, so they needed to stand out from the background. This required me to look at the image as two different segments: the mushrooms themselves and then everything else. This is where Lightroom’s new masking function really shined.
First, I used the new Select Subject feature to, obviously, select the subject. To my amazement, Lightroom quickly identified the mushrooms as the subject. I then lowered the highlights on the top surfaces of the mushrooms, raised the shadows on their undersides to bring out more detail, and added some texture and clarity to provide a little more definition to them.
Next, I turned my attention to everything else. Again, I used the Select Subject feature to select the mushrooms again. But, this time I used the Invert command to invert the selection to select everything but the mushrooms. The area selected now consisted of the background sky and the fallen tree the mushrooms were growing on. For these parts of the image, I reduced the exposure and highlights, slightly raised the shadow areas of the tree, and reduced color saturation.
My final steps were to crop the image to a 1:1 aspect ratio to eliminate the extraneous background area and adjust the color luminance and saturation of the mushrooms to make them really stand front and center in the image.