If you ever walk down the forest, maybe you have seen mushrooms with their brown hats, green moss that looks inviting to lay your head-on.
There are many hidden things in this whole world that the human cannot see easily. When you look at those things, you just mesmerized.
Alison Pollack is a photographer who loves to walk in a forest more than just a way to relax and unwind. Alison has a deep interest in fungi and Myxomycetes, sometimes she captures tiniest things like one or two millimeters. Her breathtaking pictures, which reveal the beautiful macro world of our forests.
She loves nature and has an interest in macro photography for many years, but her love for capturing the miniature fungi and myxomycetes developed around about a couple of years ago.
“I didn’t get serious about it until a couple of years ago when I found and photographed my first Myxomycete.
I had no idea what it was, so I looked it up online. I was immediately fascinated with the Myxomycete life cycle, and I have been avidly hunting and photographing them since then. As I looked for the tiny Myxos, I also started noticing tiny fungi and started photographing and learning about them as well.
These tiny organisms are all over the forest when it rains, but they are so small that people just don’t see them. My goal is to reveal their beauty and magic!” Alison told Bored Panda.
“I am especially drawn to the tiny ones and the detail that cannot be seen by the naked eye. Many people have never heard of Myxomycetes, and also do not know that there are so many beautiful tiny fungi. My passion is to photograph them to show people the amazing beauty right at their feet as they walk in the forest,” Alison added.
“Myxomycetes used to be considered part of the Kingdom of Fungi. They have characteristics of both fungi and amoebas and are now being placed in the Kingdom called Protista. Most of them are only 1-2 millimeters, much smaller than typical macro images. The common name for Myxomycetes is slime molds, but that isn’t a very appealing name!”
Capturing the smaller subject is always challenging, “When photographing such tiny subjects, the depth of field is extremely small, sometimes only one-hundredths of a millimeter.
I use a technique called focus stacking, in which I take many multiple images at different focus distances and combine them to give a resulting photo with sharp detail from front to back. For the smallest of subjects, less than one millimeter tall, I typically take 200-300 images and combine them to create a single photo,” the talented photographer revealed to Bored Panda.
“I look for dots of color on the forest floor and decomposing logs, then I look more closely with an LED-lit 10x magnifying lens I always carry with me. If I find a good decomposing log, I can be there for hours, looking at many places in the log to find and photograph these treasures of the forest, as I like to call them,” she says.
“I take a lot of time to compose and take my photographs. I spend quite a bit of time cleaning my subjects with very small paintbrushes and surgical tweezers, as I want people to see their beauty. The composition is important, so I look for what I think is the best angle that shows off their beauty and details,” Alison adds.
Recommended Video
“Massive dust storm captured on camera in India”
[rumble video_id=v56bch domain_id=u7nb2]