Selm Muir Woods - Fungi and Insect Photo Opportunity, Sunday Oct 11th 9:00am - 12:00pmAn excellent photo opportunity to try your hand at photographing fungi and insects locally at the Selm Muir ridge (adjacent to Selm Muir reservoir, just south of Oakbank Bing) with our Vice Chairman and Natural History (macro) enthusiast Ian McIntosh. Those of you who are familiar with Ian's photos know that he has produced some outstanding and award winning work in this field.
Ian will lead a group of our club members along a small run-off adjacent to the Selm Muir woods which has many examples of fungi and always a good chance of insects. This is an great opportunity for some of our newer members to try their hand at this very "do-able" and certainly different, type of photography.
The emphasis is not on equipment, so you do not have to have the latest and greatest models. This type of photography can be taken just as easily with compacts and mid range cameras as it can with DSLR models. The club has 2 Canon A620 compact cameras that are perfectly adequate for this, and can be borrowed for this occasion if you don't have a camera.
Whatever camera you have, should have a macro setting (almost all do now - the little tulip setting). A tripod would be ideal, even a mini tripod, but a beanbag, rucksack, camera bag or even placing the camera on the ground will work. A release cable (mechanical or electrical) helps, but putting the camera on self-timer also works just as well.
The emphasis is more about
locating, shooting, reflecting, and learning. The more practice you do, the better you become. There has been quite a few of our members taking superb images with compact and mid range cameras.
Selm Muir is constantly damp underfoot – so walking boots or wellies are recommended as is the wearing of old trousers, and perhaps knee-pads as you’ll probably have to get "down and dirty". A sheet of plastic or a plastic backed picnic blanket could be an asset when lying down to get the shot you really want.
So if you think you might want to see how it is done, and trying Natural History Photography yourself, with a club member that knows the subject very well, please respond with a reply below.
See you there!
Take the Morton Road south off the A71 at Oakbank Bing, and look for the Selm Muir sign 3 miles up the road on your left. Park off the road, just outside the small gate.
