Mushroom yet again

After a long, very, very hot June and July, August has been wet and the mushrooms just keep coming up. We have found eight of the Giant Puffballs on our property as of today and many, many others of various shapes, sizes, and colours on and off the property. I thought you might be interested in how the Giant Puffball that I put up on the 24th looked on the 30th.



Below is a pair of much smaller mushrooms.



The two puffballs above are called Curtis's Puffballs (Lycoperdon curtisii) if I am not mistaken. They also allow me to answer Pablo's question of the other day about the photography involved as the same process was used for these puffballs as was used for the Giant Swallowtail caterpillar. The puffballs are about 2 cm (.8 inch) across. Our FinePix Fujifilm S7000 digital camera has not only a "Macro" setting but also a "Super Macro" setting that allows us to get within 1 cm (0.4 inch) of the subject. The photo of the puffballs came onto the computer in a 73 x 99 cm format (29 x 39 inches). The actual "puffball part" of the photo was 28 x 33 cm (11 x 13 inches). That gives me lots of room to crop and still end up with a large image. (I cut the images down to 6 x 4.5 inches on Photoshop to keep the photos small enough to upload on our rural line without spending the night waiting.) We bought the camera just to take photos like these.