My fungus of the day is this one:
Not just because it's beautiful and still one of my favourite fungi, but also because of the story of how I came to be where it was and what happened when I photographed it. It's a fairly long story so make yourself comfy...
It starts on August the 19th. As I've mentioned before, and am not in the least ashamed to mention again, my wife, Angie, won the Havant Literary Festival's playwriting competition and part of the prize for this was to have her play performed at the Bench Theatre during the festival in September. So we were making numerous trips down to Havant during August for auditions, rehearsals, etc. I got involved with taking rehearsal and publicity photos but wasn't always needed. So on this particular night I dropped Angie at the theatre and headed into Portsmouth to take some sunset and night-time shots of the Spinnaker Tower.
The plan was that I would be back at the theatre to pick Angie up at 10pm but she phoned me at about 9:30 to say that they'd finished early and she was ready to go. I was still in Portsmouth a good twenty minutes away and wasn't too happy about her waiting outside in the dark - the theatre had been locked up for the night by then. I turns out I needn't have worried as one of the cast members - a true gent - stayed with her until I got there. But I didn't know that at the time so was rushing to get back and got flashed by a "safety camera" while doing 38 mph on a dual carriageway that I thought was a 40mph limit. The notion that firing a high-powered flash into oncoming traffic at night can be done in the name of "safety" is still not one I can get my head around but that's another story.
The upshot was that two weeks later I had a choice to make: a £60 fine and three penalty points or £70 for a half-day "Driver Awareness" course. Knowing that 3 points could add a bit more than £10 to my insurance premium I opted for the latter. So that's how I came to be at the Holiday Inn, Basingstoke today.
The course was due to start at 1:30 and there were dire warnings about what would happen to people arriving late. As my journey to basingstoke involves a considerable stretch of the M25 I set off much earlier than was necessary and packed my camera on the assumption that there was bound to be something worth photographing. I arrived about midday, parked up and went for a recce round the hotel.
There was a small copse of trees, mainly birch but one beech and one yew, with a few magpies hopping about beneath them. As I approached the magpies flew off but I could see that there were several different species of fungus growing there including quite a lot of fly agaric. As is usually the case most were quite beaten up but there was one freshly emerged one that looked the business. It was also in quite a good position at the top of a gentle slope so I could get a nice low angle on it. They don't call me "Horizontal Dave" for nothing so down I went!
After a number of shots at different apertures, varying exposure compensation, some with fill-flash and so on, I get up again. This is when I discovered
why the magpies had been there. The evidence is all over my jeans and liberally spread across the front and arms of my jacket.
And that, your honour, is how I came to be locked in a disabled toilet, in my underwear, with my trousers on the baby-change table, trying to scrub magpie poo out of them with a damp towel pilfered from the chamber-maid's laundry basket.
All things considered, this is not a photograph that I'm going to forget in a hurry.
Was it worth it?
Oh yes!
Dave P.