I’m always up for a nice walk around some National Trust grounds (member for quite a few years now), so when they announced a ‘Fungal Foray’ at Calke Abbey we signed up for a couple of tickets.

This wasn’t a walk intended to show us which mushrooms were edible, it was to show the variety of fungi that exist in the Nature Reserve. I have done one of those at Calke before, but that wasn’t organised by the NT. The walk was guided by one of the rangers who was a pretty keen amateur mycologist but she was keen to correctly point out that she couldn’t 100% identify everything and to trust nothing. I decided to take the DSLR along as it’s been a while since it’s been used.

The walk was very informative. Specimens were a bit sparse due to the glorious weather we’d been having, so there were some points where the leader had to produce one she’d found earlier, or in a couple of occasions had moved from another site.

So here’s some photos from the day:

Came home from work to find this little creature lurking by our front door, so the camera was duley fetched and some pictures taken:

This was taken with a 30D using a Sigma 24-70 2.8. Liked the capture given that it was handheld and dim. Pushed it through a little light Pshopping for to remove noise, sharpen and sort the levels out.

Keep seeing this little spiders and bugs around, think the urge for a proper macro lens is going to get a lot stronger in the near future.