Got inspired of @bescouted photos to use flash in forest at middle of the day. Couldn’t wait any longer so i convinced my SO that we need some mushrooms to make kottletis and sauce for buckwheat. We knew that it’s not the season yet, but walking in clean forest is already rewarding enough. To make thing interesting i rented an electric car(38€ per day) that can go up to 100 km with full tank. In Estonia you can easily rent electric car with your phone and charge it free in over 167 charging stations(for small country Estonia it’s far enough). Mushrooming spot was about 60 km from Tallinn and oh how wrong i was about the mileage. Little Nissan Leaf only handled 60km, so we made a stop in gas station to fill it up. After finishing our hot dogs, the tank was charged to 90%. Amazingly fast, took about 20 minutes from 20% to 90%!
Plan was to drive deep in the forest, in hope that there’s more mushrooms. In first 30 minutes we found this cutie
A very edible mushroom that’s one of my favourites. It doesn’t need any boiling and is delicious in sauces. Just add some butter on pan and fry it 10 minutes. DELICIOUS!
First photo is without flash. Bottom one was done with my SO holding flash above it with 45 degree angle.
Soon after we started finding more mushrooms and got so excited that I forgot that I came here to make photos 😀 Small dopamine shots that you get by seeing new mushrooms makes you more focused on the goal and you forget everything else. Luckily I marked our car on Google maps, so we had no trouble finding it later 🙂
On our way back to car we noticed a mushroom that I couldn’t classify, but because it looked legit and was pretty big, we took it anyway 🙂
SO found a cute frog that she wanted to catch and demanded that i take a photo with the frog on top of mushroom. Who can argue with her, it looked cute AF 🙂
I’m still not sure if it’s Birch boletes. Just in case i boiled it for 10 minutes and used it in kottletis. In hindsight i can tell they weren’t poisonous 🙂
This one my SO hold flash almost above the tree trunk. Looks ominous 😛
Sunset was close and we decided to find our way out of the forest. We had travel so deep in forest that even google maps didn’t show any roads to direct us out. So we had to do it old school.
Car showed that we had 30 km left, so we had to preserver every energy we had. Turned off radio, display, lights and tried to keep speed steady as possible. With little sun shining between clouds we managed to pinpoint north and approximate direction where highway might be. Unfortunately the road we chose lead us to dead-end and wasted 10km of electricity.
After big fuck up we decided to do some more research before we move anywhere. After 20 minutes of intense reading i found old website that was funded by Estonian government where all small roads where charted. Even with knowledge which road to take, we still were in a pickle, because we had 20 km left and highway was about 13 km and from there we had to drive to gas station to charge our car, which was about 5 km. Of course i knew that car has small emergency battery somewhere, but nowhere to know how much it would help us.
Sunset was over and i had to turn on lights to at least see some road and to scare of any possible bears. Lights lost us 3 km. When all hope was lost and we had 6 km left, we started to hear sweet sound of highway – civilization. One thing i didn’t calculate is that it’s not that easy to turn back in highway. We could see gas station with our eyes but to get there we had to do 4km detour. By the time we arrived there, car had only 1 km left. Felt like a movie, where bombs counter stops exactly on 1 😀 What an adventure it was. 10/10 would try it again!
Results: about half a bucket of mushrooms, mostly boletes, some milk mushrooms and few golden chanterelle. Enough for 2 coarse meal 🙂
Next time we are planning to grab a tent, to do some mushroom picking at daytime and star time lapses at night. Keep mushrooming 😉
- Aperture: ƒ/10
- Camera: Canon EOS 6D
- Flash fired: no
- Focal length: 105mm
- ISO: 4000
- Shutter speed: 1/125s
