I brought my camera down to the lower forest to look for some mushrooms, and was amused to discover that some animal had wolfed down the large white mushroom I'd photographed yesterday. It was kind enough to leave the bottom of the stem so that I could identify it as *probably* a Short-Stemmed Russula mushroom (solid stem). I stepped into the forest for a few moments and looked for lumps pushing up the leaves...and I found one!! Pushing back some leaves, I discovered this trio! (and actually, the blurry white spot in the front is a fourth tiny one just beginning to gain size!) I decided to only expose their gills and pull away most of the the matter on their caps so you can see how they look.

In the end, I ran into many problems. I realized that the caps were blown out and this hurt the image. I didn't clear enough of the leaves from the background. The 2.8 aperture exposure I took was too far away, so I didn't get the soft background I wanted. The forest was dark enough that I wasn't able to get an exposure with a high enough aperture to include the back edges of the mushrooms. ARGH! However, I did what I could to make this a nice image. I replaced the background with a texture and then I turned it into a sepia toned image and added a vignette to darken the lower edge and corners. I hope you like it! Is it too fussy? I've been staring at it so long I nearly chucked the whole thing! "THIS IS CRAP!!!" But Steve thought it was very nice so here you go. :)