Thanks to Mike's very precise directions I have now visited the site for photos 1 & 2 and was able to find the colony immediately. Since it was a hot day and I was carrying a heavy bag, three cameras and a heavy Benbo tripod, I was indeed grateful that Mike's directions were so exact!
Unfortunately, the lichen itself did not live up to hopes of a rare species - it is
Cladonia diversa again! The surface features match that species, and NOT
C. borealis.
This illustrates a point I should have remembered when looking at Mike's original photographs. In my posts above, I assumed the lichen was grey, but there is a big problem with digital photography and the yellow-green colour (usnic acid?) of many lichens. It varies from camera to camera, but lichen yellow-green often reproduces grey. (This can affect
Usnea,
Ramalina,
Xanthoparmelia,
Lecanora sulphurea, amongst others, and is evident in many published photographs.)
Anyhow, the colony Mike photographed does have a distinct yellow-green colour, typical of
C. diversa. (In actual fact, according to the new lichen handbook,
C. borealis also contains usnic acid and should also be yellow-green tinged, despite the otherwise excellent photograph in 'Wirth' that shows it as pure grey, so my original thinking was flawed in any case.)
I mentioned I was carrying three cameras, each of which has different strengths and weaknesses. The comparison using Mike's
Cladonia colony was instructive.
Nikon D100 (with 105mm macro lens) - accurate colour, best performance [but needs the heavy tripod and the setting with the mirror locking up before exposure!]
Olympus SP560UZ (compact, very good close-up facility, easy to manipulate into awkward places, superb camera in many ways but awful colour rendition in this precise yellow-green area, irrespective of colour saturation setting) -
Cladonia came out more or less pure grey.
Fuji S100FS (not an SLR but too big to be called a "compact", supposedly with the same close-focus as the Olympus but image size is smaller at the same distance and image quality slightly poorer at high magnification) - yellow-green colour evident but slightly muted.
The S100FS has an alternative colour system supposedly matching Fuji 'Velvia' film. I have not tried this yet (forgot about it), but probably it would have been better for the purpose.
Anyhow, I can now be definite about the ID of Mike's
Cladonia and I got some good photographs of a few other things. Not at all a wasted day.
Again my thanks to Mike for directions to an interesting site.
Alan
Linear Mode
