mushrooms at the doors, and other stories (+20 macros)

sitting at home with everything shut down (thanks god, we still have internet!) I spend my time digging the archives. Today I share some pictures I did last summer during the little three-day holidays at my countryside.

You won't believe but I have a pleasure to watch (and capture) all this nature diversity going as far, as just 20-30 metres from my doors.

We keep birches, pines and other wild trees growing at our place, and same with moss. And, you know, they give back a lot! For example, they help mushrooms to grow at our land. We always can have a little crop of this and that, here and there (ofc, when its proper weather).

Last summer I came to our countryside house equipped with Sigma 150mm dedicated macro lens (and no tripod). So, all of the pics below captured with this setup. I almost did no .raw files, so everything here are edited jpegs, no raw-s.

I have a lot of sun which was good for doing macros. Above is a simple tree leave (with some disease). Splendid, isnt it?..

The willow tea -- blooming have finished, and the plant is ready to release its seeds to the wind.
I did this capture having in mind doing later a black-and-white version of it. Here it is:

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Our neightbour has a 3-m pond full of water lillies.

...and its full of intresting creatures, which my little baby enjoy to research.

They are really tiny, but with the help of a decent macro lens I can show them to you.

Probably, its a larva... and I absolutely out of ideas who'se larva it is. At least it is not a dragonfly... tho looks like quite a predatory type.

Another one is salamander, or axolotl. I used a plate filled with water as a water tank, to get the best macros. Very intresting creatures.

Our cat was highly intrested in researching them too, but we did not let her a go.

We had to isolate her :/

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Our little harvest of redhead boleto (Léccinum aurantíacum) -- provided us a tasty soupee.

This is not an apple. Its a 'cantaloopa' water-mellon, and of course it wasnt cropped anywhere around -- it came from the supermarket... and before that, it came from Antille islands, located at Cabibbean sea. Turned out it has almost no taste at all. BUT, the smell of this thingie was... stupefying! I bought it for the smell, and kept it on my desk for two weeks until it went bad.

Theres a small hidden kingdom of lichens that borders our site -- I spent 2 hours there laying on my belly, and got a dozen good shots there.