Between the gills of a mushroom, 2nd ed.

[rjlittlefield]

Canon 300D, 20mm f/2.0 Olympus bellows lens at 8.1X onto the sensor. Reproduced here at about 75X.
Intact cap, backlit using halogen fiber illuminator. Stacked, 29 frames at 0.0005" focus step.

This one's from the recent archives, shot a couple of months ago.

These are cystidia between the gills of a particular kind of mushroom that grows around a rotting stump in my yard.

I've been checking all the other mushrooms in my yard, hoping to find some that are equally or even more interesting, but no such luck. They've all had smooth gills, no cystidia.

Fortunately, there was a new crop of this kind every few weeks, so I got a couple of chances at it.

See this posting from April for more discussion & other photos.

--Rik

[Carl_Constantine]

This is a very interesting pic Ric. We have some pretty interesting mushrooms up here in the north west that might be better suited to this.

Also, in this particular photo, it looks like something happened with the stack in the lower right corner (slightly blurred/smudged). was something on the lens, or did something happen with the stack?

[rjlittlefield]

...looks like something happened with the stack in the lower right corner (slightly blurred/smudged). was something on the lens, or did something happen with the stack?

Neither of the above. It's darker because there was a gill shaped to block most of the light there, and it's fuzzy because most of the cystidia in that area were outside the focus volume.

I thought about cropping that area off, but every crop I played with also took away something else that I wanted to keep.

For a pretty-picture print, I'd probably clone in some good looking cystidia from someplace else, but this particular image was targeted for Olympus BioScapes, and I didn't think they'd appreciate that sort of retouching.

--Rik

[beetleman]

Great stack Rik...and a very interesting specimen

[MacroLuv]

Could be used for science fiction scenery.

[Ken Ramos]

Great shot there Rik, something most of us, myself included, overlook quite often.