Mad About Mushrooms – For The Denver Post
Posted on 25. Aug, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in Blog: On Assignment
VIA The Denver Post:
Britt Bunyard was on the hunt, picking his way through a stand of lodgepole pine, knife in one hand and a red-and- white polka-dotted basket in the other.
In an instant — it’s always in an instant for the stalker and the stalked — Bunyard spied his quarry, splayed before him on the ground.
“Ah, this is what I’ve been looking for,” he said. “Laccaria. Look, dozens of them.”
Bunyard pointed at an array of copper- tinted mushrooms dotting the tawny duff of the forest floor. In a flash, one was dug up and deposited in his basket.
For Bunyard, it was one of the sundry triumphs at the North American Mycological Association’s 50th Anniversary Foray, held earlier this month at Snow Mountain Ranch, 4 miles north of Tabernash.
You can read the rest of Bill Porter’s article on here.
The evening before I was to hike in the woods, with mushroom hunters in search of fungi, I decided to drag my light gear out and maybe work on a series of portraits of the hunters. According to the photo editor this would be a quirky group of folks – who did turn out to be quirky but extremely welcoming to this interloper. Nice, but honestly the thought of eating mushrooms, as food, truly gross me out.
Visions of decked out fungi hunters danced in my imagination.
I should have figured that something too perfect might go down in flames. After shooting my assignment for The Denver Post I set up a ‘studio’ in the lobby of the hotel that most of the hunters were staying in.
My plan was to catch the flow of fungi folks as they walked into the hotel and capture their portrait – with the help of a ‘seemless’ – as they exited the bus that transported them to and from the woods where the forays were happening.
Fungus did not ruin my grand idea only rotten logistics and bad information regarding the time the next busload of North American Mycological Association members would show up.
An hour went by.
Then an hour and a half. I really wish that bus would have showed up.
All I have to show for it is the following images. The first, taken as a setup shot for the awesome blog post I was writing in my head about the awesome portrait series I was getting ready to tackle.
So, yeah.
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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