2026 British Photography Awards Shortlist
The shortlist for this year’s British Photography Awards has been announced and I am delighted to have had an image selected by the judges.
My photo “Wrinkled Peaches” is one of the 25 photos shortlisted in the macro category this year.
Voting for the people’s choice award is now underway and my photo can be found here. Any votes will be very much appreciated but not expected!
There is one particular dead, fallen, elm tree which I make a point of visiting each Autumn as it’s usually a great spot for fruiting wrinkled peach mushrooms to form. It’s never a guarantee but that’s part of the fun. Sometimes there are none, other times they get eaten by slugs before they have an opportunity to properly grow and occasionally they grow in large clumps. They make fantastic subjects for macro photos because they undergo so many changes during their growth. Unlike most mushrooms, where they tend to look the most impressive when they are fully grown, wrinkled peaches have an unrivaled beauty that can be captured from the very early stages of emergence all the way to when they fully open. The ‘guttation’ droplets, that form at various points during growth, can look particularly striking early on as they often dwarf the mushroom itself and at higher magnifications the colours within them are incredible.
This photo was taken last Autumn when there were considerably less fruiting bodies on the log than in the previous year. Despite this there was still a small group of three in a very photogenic arrangement. Although I had enough frames captured for a deep stack from the very front of the middle mushroom, all the way to the back of the two behind it, I opted to limit the size of the stack. When focus stacking it can be hard to accept that sometimes less is more, given that the name of the game is to reveal as much detail as possible. In this case, having all three mushrooms in crisp focus produced a very flat and unnatural looking final image. Keeping the entire central mushroom in focus and then having that focus fall off behind it, instinctively draws the eye to that area of the photo and creates enough depth for it to continue travelling through afterwards.
