A 1mm mushroom carrying an almost-as-big droplet

Sometimes nature hides its most extraordinary scenes in places most people never look. While walking through the Kampina near Oisterwijk with my wife Christel and my sister-in-law Hanneke — a birthday walk and lunch gift from last October — I noticed something no taller than a grain of rice. There, growing out of the lush green moss on a tree trunk, stood a tiny Mycena adscendens. Barely 1 mm tall, delicate as a whisper… and balancing a raindrop almost as large as its cap.

Photographing something that small is always a technical puzzle. Tripods were impossible on the tree bark, the light was miserable — wet, grey, and sleepy — and the mushroom itself looked like shiny plastic thanks to the moisture. So I relied on my Canon 5DsR paired with the MP-E 65mm, shooting handheld with a flashlight as an improvised lightsource.
1/250s, ISO 3200, and the fixed aperture of the MP-E — a setup that pushes both the photographer and the camera to their limits. At this magnification even your own heartbeat becomes camera shake.

But somehow, everything aligned. The droplet clung to the cap with perfect surface tension, turning the whole scene into a tiny physics lesson: cohesion, adhesion, and gravity negotiating their delicate balance on a 1 mm stage.

Moments like this remind me why I love macro photography — you don’t just take a picture; you discover a world that was already there, quietly waiting.

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The Wonderful World of Fungus – Part 2

After last week’s rains, the Kampina near Oisterwijk revealed a hidden kingdom—one that thrives quietly beneath our feet. This week, I set my lenses to macro mode and explored the intricate, often overlooked life of fungi and slime molds.

First, I found Rickenella fibula, a tiny moss-dwelling mushroom just a few millimeters tall, its orange caps glowing against the green carpet. Nearby, Mycena stylobates stood on delicate stems, their translucent caps perched above fallen leaves. Looking closely, I could see the long, thread-like hyphae weaving underneath—nature’s living network, breaking down leaf litter and recycling nutrients.

Then came the slime molds. One bright orange species looked like clusters of tiny eggs, each a potential transformation into a spore-bearing structure. Another, still a mystery to me, appeared as a single white, chalk-like sphere on moss—perhaps the fruiting body of another slime mold, or something else entirely. Nature loves to leave puzzles for us to solve.

After hours in this miniature world, I reached the heart of the Kampina and paused at a weathered workman’s hut before heading home. My Canon 5D Mark III with MP-E macro lens captured the fine details, while the Canon 7D Mark II with Sigma 100–400mm kept watch for the bigger picture.

Next up: Part 3—The blooming heath and wildflowers of the Kampina.

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