On Easter Monday, I thought i would check out a local forest which was hand planted some 100 years ago in central Victorian highlands which makes it rather unique in Australia as it is mainly trees from northern hemisphere origin.
I had never been to this forest before and as it was a beautiful sunny early Autumn day, it would be great for a walk, but probably too sunny for great photographic forest landscape shots.
I only had an hour or so, so I took my beloved Panasonic GH-1 and Leica-D 25mm f/1.4 lens with the primary aim just to document ideas for shots in better lighting and when I had more time.
In stark contrast to native Australian Eucalypt forests, this man made forest of diversified trees including conifers, and oaks, had a very different ecology – most noticeable were the multitude of introduced mushroom species including the poisonous, hallucinogenic, Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) and the very weird absence of the usually omnipresent Australian native bull ant – which I must say made the walking a lot more relaxed, as no-one enjoys being stung by those ants!
Maybe the bull ants are killed by the Amanita, or they need Eucalypt habitat?
The flip out swivel LCD screen of the GH-1 was fantastic as usual for ground level work of hand held shots of mushrooms – the following two are at the closest focus of this lens and show the difference between f/1.4 (the first one) and f/2.8, – oh, and I do love native 16:9 image aspect ratio which is available on the GH-1!
at f/1.4:
and at f/2.8:
and here is a more mature Amanita muscara:
and of course, I better show a sample of this lovely forest:
more photos from the walk here
seductively beautiful!
Wow,
The photos are all so beautiful,,:D
Cool photos – which forest is this ?
can you still use the aperture dial when using the d lens on the GH1? or do you have to go through the menu, like using it on olympus 4/3rds bodies?
nice photos! did you make a mushroom soup out of all the varieties?
Hi Carl, the aperture dial DOES work on panasonic cameras and I really love this – wish olympus would support the aperture ring as well!
and no, I think I would be hallucinating for the rest of my life making mushroom soup of these 🙂
cheers! that’s good to know, i use the gh1 and have been considering the 25mm for a while now.
I’m sure that would be very frustrating too, having your skills but unable to photograph what you see because it’s not really there!