Fungi at Gamlingay Woods

More fungi.  This time  from Gamlingay wood.  Again the fungi were abundant in both numbers and variety.  There were lots of large specimens.  Plenty of pale milk caps, and I even managed to find a pristine Fly Agaric.  But it was the tiny ones that mainly took my interest.

 

 

 

Fungi at Ashridge

Due to work commitments, I couldn't make Ann's annual fungi forage trip to Thetford last Sunday.  So instead I headed out to Ashridge the day before.  This does seem to be a good year for fungi, and I didn't have to explore to far to find several varieties.  Sadly no decent Fly Agarics.  I found a few specimens, but they had all been thoroughly munched.  There wasn't much autumn colour either.  At a guess, maybe 10% of the trees had changed.

Dahlias at Anglesey Abbey

Last weekend I visited Anglesey Abbey for their Dahlia festival.  There were several artful arrangements of the cut flowers dotted around the grounds, which personally I didn't find all that interesting.  Instead I headed to the section of the garden that had the living blooms.  Here Dahlias of all shapes and colours could be found. 

My plan was to use the variety of flowers for some creative images.  I started with some in-camera double exposures.  These are much easier with the Olympus EM1 than with my Canon 40D, thanks to the ability to see the first image in the view finder when framing the second.  For some shots I chose two contrasting flowers for the double image.  For others, I used the same flower, turning the camera between the first and second shots.

 

 

After that I tried some intentional camera movement.  These were much more hit and miss.  I tried spinning the camera during the exposure, but I couldn't get the swirls I was after.

 

Finally, apparently not everyone likes "fluffy" images, so here are some straightforward detail shots.