Fungi foray in the New Forest

DISCLAIMER: I’ve labelled mushrooms on this blog. I’m new to foraging and my labels may be wrong. Refer to a professional. We had the knowledgeable Lisa of Edulis and Matt of Eden Wild Food by our sides to show us the ropes.

Showering at the end of today reveals little pin-pricks on my skin from brambles, itchy raised bumps of stinging nettles unnoticed until now, and “foraging fingers” of yellow, brown, and slime. This all gives way to an overwhelming sense of a thrill which, until recently, I’d have reserved for discovering a new piece of music from my favourite artist or experiencing some new culture or cuisine.

New Forest mist at dawn

Rewind the clock back 2 weekends, and I was camping in the New Forest. Camping is not a pastime I had ever relished. I had taken every opportunity over the last 15 years since my teens to scald the stupid types who trade warmth, civilisation, slated pitched roofs and other first world comforts for a night in an undersized, cold, damp figleaf of canvas that barely covers enough floor space to lie in the foetal position. I’m not an outdoorsy type.

But after 16 years of refusing to camp (I last camped in my teens), I gave in, on the proviso that there would be a minimum of 18 inches of air between me and the ground at night – oh – and on the proviso we would find a room with a view.

The reason for all of this camping nonsense? Mushrooms. I’ve long held a great deal of respect for fungi, although I’ve not until now known the first thing about the subject.

We booked onto a mushroom course, and within a day of meeting the wide-eyed Lisa Cutcliffe of Edulis Wild Food, I was bitten by more than one type of bug.

A basket full of edibles - with one exception

A basket full of edibles – with one exception

Lisa Cutcliffe - look what we have for lunch

Lisa Cutcliffe – look what we have for lunch

The mesmerising gills of the porcelain mushroom

The mesmerising gills of the porcelain mushroom

The common reaction to “I’m going to pick some mushrooms to eat” is “goodness, isn’t that dangerous?”. Well it only took a day with Lisa to realise how much I have to learn in the coming years about the enchanting world of fungi, but this one day certainly set me on the right path. Now I’m able to confidently identify 20+ mushrooms from 10 paces. Since the course I have become somewhat obsessed with how to determine the right environment for different types of mushrooms, and this seems to me harder than making sure you don’t poison yourself.

It’s hard to work out where mushrooms grow.

But if all else fails, you could do worse than starting with a wood that looks like something out of a fairy-tale:

How to find the perfect woods for foraging - choose the ones that look most fairytale

How to find the perfect woods for foraging – choose the ones that look most fairy-tale

Lisa taught us about the trees that fungi seem to latch on to most, I won’t spill the beans here but these are two of the main four:

Learn your leaves

Learn your leaves

An early success: some beautiful Chanterelles.

A single Chanterelle

A single Chanterelle

Beautiful yellow gold colour of the Chanterelles

Beautiful yellow gold colour of the Chanterelles

One of the memorable pieces of advice given to us by Lisa was this:

Start off by learning the 50 tastiest edible mushrooms, and the 50 most poisonous ones, and don’t bother with everything in between.

To my mind, the safest place to start is to look for the Boletes. These are mushrooms with tubes underneath the cap, as opposed to the more common gills. Apart from one or two of the more rare Boletes, they are all pretty harmless, and the best Boletes can be some of the most valuable and delicious mushrooms. The Cep (aka Porcini or Penny Bun) is one of the superstars of the mushroom world, as such they can be a great find.

Here are some Boletes. Had I seen the bruised underside before, I would have thought “ugh, that’s a rubbish mushroom”. Now I have a great fondness for seeing the tubes under a Bolete bruising blue. Combine this with brown flecking on the stem and this means you’ve found a Bay Bolete:

The distinctive gentle blue bruising of the Bay Bolete

The distinctive brown stem and gentle blue bruising of the Bay Bolete

Brown Birch Bolete, hidden in the heather

Leccinum Versicolor (Mottled Bolete) , hidden in the moss and bracken

Another Birch Bolete

Another Mottled Bolete

Despite turning a scary electric blue when cut, the Scarletina Bolete is edible and delicious

Despite turning a scary electric blue when cut, the Scarletina Bolete is edible and delicious

These slimy looking mushrooms are called Porcelains, and they are edible. They are very fond of Beech and they grow in this tufted manner. I’ve found quite a few since our day with Lisa but I’m yet to take the plunge and cook them up! They are exquisite to look at and touch.

A tuft of porcelain mushrooms on a tree

A tuft of porcelain mushrooms on a tree

A pair of Porcelain Mushrooms

A pair of Porcelain Mushrooms

We met quite a few weird fungi on our travels, including this little coral:

Coral Fungi

Coral Fungi

The Tawny Grisette with its strongly grooved cap edges and tall elegant stem:

The Tawny Grisette mushroom

The Tawny Grisette mushroom

Mushrooms on a mound of moss

Winter Chanterelles on a mound of moss

Some tufted mushrooms growing from a log

Some other-worldly tufted mushrooms growing from a log

Golden mushroom cap in sunlight

A Blusher looking golden brown in the sun

Lisa opened our eyes to so many wonders of the natural world, including this Beefsteak mushroom found by one of the course attendees. You can pull these straight from the tree and eat them raw. Surely this is the closest thing in the natural world to eating cured meats?

Cutting the Beefsteak Mushroom

Cutting the Beefsteak Mushroom

Looks like pancetta - tastes like mushroom

Looks like pancetta – tastes like mushroom

Cross section of the majestic Beefsteak Mushroom

Cross section of the majestic Beefsteak Mushroom

A vegan's delight - the blood of a Beefsteak Mushroom

A vegan’s delight – the blood of a Beefsteak Mushroom

Although this was a fungi foraging course, we also took some time to get to know a number of other special things in the New Forest, including edible flowers, mosses, hawthorns, sloes. Here is a plant known as Butcher’s Broom, said to have been used by butchers to clean their block as the leaves are very tough and scratchy.

Butcher's Broom - used to clean butchers blocks

Butcher’s Broom (poisonous) – used to clean butchers blocks

We did concentrate on edible mushrooms, but a lot of time was given to the inedibles which can be equally (if not more) alluring. Here’s Lisa and her Fly Agaric, with its own mini-me:

The Fly Agaric Mini-Me - mushroom jewellery worn by Lisa Cutcliffe

The Fly Agaric Mini-Me – mushroom jewellery worn by Lisa Cutcliffe

It's poisonous but pretty

The pretty and the poisonous

The quintessential fairytale posionous toadstool - the Fly Agaric

The quintessential fairy-tale poisonous toadstool – the Fly Agaric

A pretty young Fly Agaric (amanita muscaria)

A young Fly Agaric (amanita muscaria)

The perfect Panther Cap (don't eat one)

The perfect Panther Cap (don’t eat one)

Our group of 20 stopped for lunch. Lisa had dreamt-up an amazing 4 course meal, starting with the mushrooms we had picked that morning fried up in butter and garlic and served with bread, followed by a feast of venison, ale, and wild mushroom stew, then a selection of cakes made with foraged goods, and finishing up with lots of impressive home made tipples (birch sap syrup, raspberry vodka, and many more!)

Cooking up the freshest mushrooms I've ever eaten

Cooking up the freshest mushrooms I’ve ever eaten

Home-baked apple and blackberry cake with elderberry icing and marrow flowers

Home-baked apple and blackberry cake with elderberry icing and mallow flowers

Vegan chocolate tray bake

Vegan chocolate tray bake

In the afternoon we were set free to practice what we had just learnt. This is what we found:

Young Panther Cap specimen

Young Panther Cap specimen

The white scales of the Panther Cap

The white scales of the Panther Cap

I don't think these are magic mushrooms as they don't have the distinctive nipple but they certainly look magical

I don’t think these are magic mushrooms as they don’t have the distinctive nipple but they certainly look magical

What to look for when identifying mushrooms

Matt Normansell shows us what to look for when identifying mushrooms – (Honey Fungus shown here)

Charcoal Burner Mushroom - mild flavour

A Brittlegill mushroom

The beautiful edible amethyst deceiver

The beautiful edible amethyst deceiver

The wicked Webcap

The wicked Webcap

Cleaning a Hedgehog Mushroom

Cleaning a Hedgehog Mushroom

mat-smith-photography-edulis-wild-foods-foraging-course-new-fore

The beautiful (but inedible) Mycena

A mushroom collector's delight: a basket full of edibles

A mushroom collector’s delight: a basket full of edibles

Oyster mushrooms on a tree fallen over a stream

Oyster mushrooms on a tree fallen over a stream

Grooved upper ring of the Blusher Mushroom

Grooved upper ring of the Blusher Mushroom

Cramp Ball growing on wood

Cramp Ball growing on wood

The Cramp Ball - used as fungus firelighter

The Cramp Ball – used as fungus firelighter

It’s no over-statement to say that Lisa’s course has re-invigourated my love of the outdoors. As a city dweller I’m seeing more and more the benefits of taking a 1-2 hour drive and spending hours just wandering and looking at things.

Ancient forest roots

Ancient forest roots

Oak leaf on a five bar gate

Oak leaf on a five bar gate

Caterpillar-nibbled leaves of an oak tree

Caterpillar-nibbled leaves of an oak tree

Excuse the Instagram-styled photo here (edited on the iphone in situ – never a good idea!), but isn’t this spread just gorgeous?

New Forest Final Spread

New Forest Final Spread

We weren’t exactly “glamping”, after all how can sleeping a mere 18 inches off the ground in a tent as long as my own body ever be considered glamourous? But I must say waking up to the stunning view of the New Forest sunrise the next day, pulling out the travel coffee kit, and cooking up a mushroom breakfast in front of a couple of wild ponies was experience never to be forgotten.

Breakfast the next day - smoked streaky bacon and mushrooms

Breakfast the next day – smoked streaky bacon and mushrooms

And the dinners have started to look a lot more like this ever since:

Wild New Forest foraged mushroom and butternut squash risotto

Wild New Forest foraged mushroom and butternut squash risotto

Mat taking photos of the sunrise

Mat taking photos of the sunrise

New Forest Ponies at sunrise in Hollands Wood

New Forest Ponies at sunrise in Hollands Wood

Wintry Christmas 2009 e-Cards from Mat Smith, London-based photographer

After an excited trip to Jessop’s, New Oxford Street yesterday morning to pick up my final set of prints for the year, I’m delighted to be able to offer an e-Card system featuring my latest wintry photographs, to send friendly Christmas messages to your contacts.

Free e-Cards: www.matsmithphotography.com/cards

e-Greetings Card Features:

  • The Polaroid and Rolleicord (film) photography of Mat Smith
  • Your personalised message
  • Six images to choose from

Enjoy!

The Principles of HDR Imaging

The term HDRI (or HDR for short) often educes strong reactions from photographers; it’s one of those photographic techniques that has been bastardised by amateurs to the extent some professional photographers shun it as new-fangled and gimmicky, or else argue that it portrays an unnatural photographic result.

It’s no surprise. A quick Google search for HDR images or a gander through photo sharing sites such as Flickr reveals the majority of photos tagged with HDR are hyper-real and over saturated at best, and vulgar, tasteless renditions of a scene at worst.

The real reason HDR is hated by some is because you can spot a bad HDR from a mile off, but it’s harder to spot a good one. This leads most people to assume HDRI generally makes for horrid images. Of course, many enthusiasts can’t spot even a bad HDR – but that’s another matter.

But isn’t the same true of any post-processing? Professional photographers tinker with saturation, contrast, crop, and toning all the time. When it’s done badly, you think “that has been tampered with”; when it’s done well, you concentrate on the actual image giving no thought to its production.

Like any photographic tool in the toolkit, it’s how you use it that matters. And as for the argument that it produces ‘unnatural’ images, this argument could be extended to any photographic technique; artificial lighting, post production, filters, cross processing, etc. In fact, a true art philosopher would argue that all photography is an unnatural rendition of reality, but maybe I’ll save this discussion for another day.

There’s no use arguing for or against HDR. It’s an image processing technique. If you believe in image processing, (and neither film nor digital photography would exist without), then you see HDRI as another tool in the toolkit. And it’s a tool that is here to stay.

Basic principles of HDRI

  1. A high dynamic range image (an HDR) is created from three or more impressions of the exact same scene. That’s three physical camera clicks (each image taken with different exposures), and three image files combined into one using HDR software. It’s possible to duplicate one photograph and edit each to produce three source files to input into your HDR software; that’s not a true HDR.
  2. The technique may be used to artistic effect, or for technical reasons. The best HDR images are constructed according to a rigorous technical process, and the same tenets of post production should define the aesthetics when it comes to combining the photographs.
  3. If HDRI is used to fulfill a technical objective (for example, showing the detail a viewer sees through a window in a room which would otherwise be washed-out on camera), the three images used must appear as close to carbon copies of one another as possible. No movement of objects in frame must occur, however small. For this reason HDRI is best suited to static scenes, and it is unsuitable for portrait photography.  It must be made using a tripod to ensure absolutely no movement of frame. Even a moving tree in the distance can ruin an HDR image.
  4. If HDRI is used for aesthetic effect, movement can add to the interest, especially where the source images are long exposure, or where it’s desirable to trace the movement of an object (e.g. light trails, moving crowds, etc.)
  5. HDRs are usually produced from three RAW images, which were made at exactly two stops apart from one another. (-2EV, 0EV, +2EV).

These principles can be applied in hundreds of different ways.

In my next HDR article to follow, I will give you a step-by-step guide to the way I make an HDR.

St Pancras Commercial Shot HDR HDRI high dynamic range image example

St Pancras Commercial Shot, HDR example