Fungi Photo Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 18

Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet

If conditions are right, the fungus will continue to grow over many many seasons. This fact that the mushroom is just the fruiting body, and not the long-lived organism itself, is why if you are out mushroom picking, and you are very careful to remove only the mushroom and not disturb the underlying fungus body (the mycelium) you should be able to return again to the same spot for more mushroom picking the next season. On the other hand, if in your mushroom picking you carelessly uproot the mushrooms by ripping and pulling out the mycelium, you will likely damage the fungus itself, and you may kill it and never find it in that spot again.


Fungi Photo Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 01

Consider for yourself a reasonably distant visual perspective of a wild mushroom. Now imagine removing a troop of 'identical' mushrooms from their surroundings, suspend them from their mycological environment, keep this distant perspective, and visually inspect them in your mind. Although you know that every mushroom is uniquely different from every other, they all appear identical from this perspective. When you remove these mushrooms from their surroundings like this, how closely do you have to examine them to see their differences? …

Fungi Photo Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 04

Whether as a photographer you are taking pictures of people, pictures of plants and animals, or pictures of mushrooms, you will always find that you arrive back home at the end of the day with great hopes and expectations, but you may often be disappointed! The advent of digital photography has made the entire process an order of magnitude easier than it has been traditionally with conventional film photography, but it is by no means certain that you will capture a scene's mood and composition as it appears to you when you are photographing it. …

Fungi Photo Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 18

If conditions are right, the fungus will continue to grow over many many seasons. This fact that the mushroom is just the fruiting body, and not the long-lived organism itself, is why if you are out mushroom picking, and you are very careful to remove only the mushroom and not disturb the underlying fungus body (the mycelium) you should be able to return again to the same spot for more mushroom picking the next season. On the other hand, if in your mushroom picking you carelessly uproot the mushrooms by ripping and pulling out the mycelium, you will likely damage the fungus itself, and you may kill it and never find it in that spot again.


Fungi Photo Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 02

The fungi kingdom, or mushroom kingdom, makes up its own kingdom because fungi are not animals, and fungi are not plants. Fungi and mushrooms do not photosynthesize and instead derive their energy from the decaying organic matter which supports them. This means they are not dependent upon the sun like most plants. This doesn't mean that all wild mushrooms grow in dark caves, however. For many fungi and wild mushrooms of the fungi kingdom the sun and the warmth it provides are essential to their life cycle. Additionally, many of the fungi kingdom live as parasites to living hosts which require sunlight to grow, and others live in a relationship with sun-loving hosts which is mutually beneficial to each (these fungi are called mycorrhizal fungi). …

Fungi Photo Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 03

Mushroom kingdom. Fungus kingdom. Fungi kingdom. Mushrooms, fungi! What's the difference? The words fungus and mushroom or fungi and mushrooms are often freely substituted for one another. Fungi kingdom is mushroom kingdom and likewise mushroom kingdom is fungi kingdom. Common usage often doesn't really distinguish much between the two terms mushroom and fungi, but there is a difference. Properly speaking a mushroom is a fruitbody of a fungus. When you inspect a wild mushroom or a troop of wild mushrooms, you may never see the underlying fungus at all. …

Fungi Photo Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 07

Not many of the original pictures of mushrooms I take will make it all the way to become a mushroom watercolor giclee print. There are so many variables involved in just capturing a fine art mushroom photograph that it is always at least very hard and frequently quite impossible to get everything perfect in the field. Sometimes it seems impossible even to capture a body of reasonable pictures of fungi to begin with, and that is just the first step to obtain the original pictures of the mushrooms from which to ultimately make the final mushroom watercolor giclee prints. …

© C Ribet 2013