My wife and I love to forage wild mushrooms. We’re very careful and we only eat stuff that we are 100% sure is safe. And we are also active members of the Maine Mushrooms (MM) Facebook page, a really responsive community of mycologically-minded people who are quick to help with IDs. I’ve actually uploaded a photo from the woods and then just stood there waiting for someone to tell me to pick something or not. Anyway, one of the choicest and most valuable mushrooms around is the Tricholoma matsutake mushroom (common name matsutake or pine mushroom), and a member of the MM group showed Karen and I his favorite spot last year (bless his heart, GPS: 62.6566667, 90.4044444). I took four specimens home, representing the various stages of develpment, from button (the most valuable), to fully mature. I focus stacked each specimen in my studio, and then combined the images into one poster-sized file. In the end, the file size for this poster celebrating T. matsutake was so big that it exceeded Photoshop’s 4GB Yes, gigabytes) single-file size, and I had to scramble to make it work. Suffice it to say, this composite is so detailed that every single grain of soil clinging to the bottom of the stapes is visible, and this would make a high-resolution print at least four feet wide!
Thinking Big
