All the pictures of fungi on this website were taken using a fairly new technique to produce extended depth of field images of small objects.

The camera is mounted on a rail, focused on a plane just in front of the object, and an exposure is made. The camera is then racked forward a little and another exposure made, in which only a small area closest to the camera is in focus, then the camera is moved again, and another exposure made, and so on until the planes of focus have passed through the entire object. 

The resultant images are then downloaded, aligned, and their pixel values averaged, resulting in a very soft image, which, none the less, contains much of the information from the original series of images in which every part of the object is in focus in at least one image.  This averaged image is then sharpened to recover the in focus details.

This method allows the camera lens to be used at its optimum aperture, no stepping down being necessary to obtain the desired depth of field, and image degradation from diffraction is greatly reduced. Alan Hadley's CombineZ, the software used for producing these images, also offers other quite different algorithms, but the one described above, the so called Average and Filter produces the best results for me when working in the field. It's disadvantages are that it amplifies the noise in the series of images, and leaves halos that often need to be edited out by hand.  But it tolerates the variation in lighting that often occurs when natural light, or natural light supplemented by a little fill flash, is used.  And it faithfully captures all textures and irregularities in the object being photographed.

The technique is both time consuming and demanding; or at least I have found it so.  But it enables objects, which are both small and deep, to be captured at high resolution. This is only a very brief summary of the technical challenges these little fungi offer, but I hope it will serve as a starting point for anyone interested in trying out the technique.

The camera is a Canon Eos 5D, the tripod is a Gitzo GT2531EX Explorer (I find the swiveling head essential, and apart from the Benbo, it's the only quality tripod I know that has this feature), and the rail is a Novoflex Castel-Q , which, as you can see, has been heavily customised.

If you would like to ask questions about my work, please feel free to get in touch via our forum.

Michael Pilkington is a professional photographer and Mycologist based in Harrogate, UK. Michael is responsible for taking and processing all of the images you will find on MycoImage.

James Winder is a student of Computer Science at Leeds Metropolitan University and is responsible for all the technical aspects of the website as well as running the forum, Facebook and Twitter pages and developing our iPhone application. Click here to visit James' website.