General Meeting and Speaker, January 2022 : Alan Rockefeller on Mushroom Photography

This presentation will teach you everything you need to know to take good photos of mushrooms. It starts out by teaching you how to take good mushroom photos with a cell phone. The second part explains how to get good photos using a high end camera, and how to use focus stacking to take exceptional photos of tiny mushrooms, including with a microscope.

Alan Rockefeller is a photographer, computer hacker, biohacker and mushroom identification specialist who currently lives in Oakland, California. In 2001 he began his autonomous studies in the field of mycology, beginning with the collection of fungi in California. Each year since 2007 he has traveled to Mexico to collect mushrooms, and has now photographed more than 1,000 species of fungi from Mexico. Based on phylogenetic and microscopic analysis he has identified several species not described in the scientific literature.  Rockefeller discovered and named Psilocybe allenii, a psychoactive mushroom (magic mushroom) from the West Coast of the United States. He recently co-authored a 2020 publication characterizing five Psilocybe species.Alan regularly identifies mushrooms for several fungus fairs in Mexico and the USA in addition to identifying fungi on websites such as Mushroom Observer, Facebook, the Shroomery and iNaturalist.

Photo: Auriscalpium vulgare. Photo by Alan Rockefeller