fungi for sublime sunday

All these are my fresh (more or less) captures from this summer, mostly July / August. The season was not very fruitful, especially speaking about foraging, but still I've got away with some stuff in my folders.

In fact, there are always mushrooms around you - just sometimes they are so tiny that you won't find them until you kneel down and search from a distance of your palm or nose. And this very beautiful photogenic stump with inedible mushrooms I found by chance. Actually, I came to this spot to take pictures of Fly agaric - I noticed a few of them them passing by the road, from a distance of three meters. These you cannot just pass, leaving them unnoticed!

I'm not the only one attracted to mushrooms (we already have over 1000 followers in the community, wow!). That is, this is not my personal aberration and unnatural passion, there is something natural and unknown in it. What are the reasons for their attraction? Why do they beckon to themselves, why do you want to photograph them again and again? So many questions, and no answers ...

I have the answers - the ones I made for myself. I'm not sure how true these are. Or maybe there is no truth, and everyone has different answers to these questions, what attracts us to mushrooms?

First, I believe, the "hunting / foraging instinct" is triggered here. This is absolutely certain, it slumbers deep inside each of us - this is what we received from our ancestors, what comes from older days.

You do not know for sure whether this mushroom is edible and useful or not - but when you see Many Mushrooms, a whole field dotted with their caps, or a stump abundantly covered with noticeable mushroom shoots - so you can mow with a scythe and collect a full basket without leaving the place - you still rejoice, rejoice subconsciously, rejoice at the find itself. Because it means opportunity. Well, of course, mushrooms turn out to be inedible, you are convinced of this, and the opportunity to collect a basket quickly "flies into the pipe" - but the joy still remains, the joy of a mushroom picker, the joy of a hunter ... and a photographer who got the opportunity to take one cool shot - or even not one, but ten!

Well, there is also the second. Appearance. Mushrooms are an amazing variety of shapes, whimsicality, variation in the basic shape that never repeats. The human eye (more precisely, the psyche) is so structured that it loves to cling to roughness, to rest on variety - especially when it gets tired of minimalism and bad sleek design that licked everything around with its long tongue. Do not just take pictures of doorknobs while sitting in Portugal and enjoy nice bokeh, right?