alison pollack captures miniature mushrooms and fungi in macro photography

california-based photographer alison pollack documents the miniature dwellers of the forest — myxomycetes or slime molds and miniature fungi. throughout her career she has been meticulously finding these organisms, identifying, photographing and sharing them in order to bring awareness to this fascinating world.  

images © alison pollack

‘these may look big in the photo, but they are really tiny, barely visible to the naked eye, each less than one millimeter tall,’ commented alison pollack on a facebook post. ‘to photograph such tiny fungi with high magnification, I used a 10x microscope lens adapted to my camera, and a technique called focus stacking.  the camera  is mounted on a finely tuned rail, and the camera is moved between each photo a mere five microns – that’s five thousandths of an inch!  each of these three photos is created from hundreds of individual images which were stacked with specialized computer software that combines the in-focus portions of each of the individual images into a composite image that shows everything in focus front to back. it’s a magical photography technique that takes a lot of time and work, but what can be revealed makes it so much fun!’

in an interview with petapixel, pollack explains how she got into mushroom and myxomycete photography: ‘I started to get serious about mushroom and myxomycete photography a couple of years ago, when I found and photographed my first myxomycete. I had no idea what it was, so I looked it up online. I was immediately fascinated with the myxomycete life cycle, and I have been avidly hunting and photographing them ever since. as I looked for the tiny myxos, I also started noticing really tiny fungi, and started photographing them as well. these tiny organisms are all over the forest when it rains, but they are so small that people just don’t see them. my goal is to reveal their beauty and magic!’

project info:

name: myxomycete/mushroom macro photography

artist: alison pollack – see more on her instagram account here