Mushroom Photography

John will start with techniques for taking close-up photos of mushrooms and slime molds. This will include camera settings, lighting concerns, and even “how to’ for taking good photos through microscopes. Karen will be speaking on best practices on photography for INaturalist. This will include what parts to photograph for better identification, labeling, and what to do if you have no cell coverage.

About the speakers:

Karen Rich Beall is an adjunct instructor of art at Lebanon Valley College, teaching Ceramics, Sculpture and Environmental Art. Karen is the owner of KRB ceramics in Mount Gretna, where she teaches classes in clay instruction to children and adults in addition to exhibiting and selling her artwork. She earned her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Tennessee and earned her BFA in Ceramics from the University of Florida. Karen’s lifelong interest in the natural world informs her artwork which is situated at the intersection of replication and abstraction of organic forms, emphasizing environmental concerns. Current work depicts mushrooms highlighting there many forms, textures and colors. In 2016 Karen created a sixteen foot long ceramic installation replicating an enlarged reproduction of the slime mold Lycogala epidendrum for an exhibition at the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Atlanta.

John Dawson is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Penn State York. Mycology, to which he was introduced in the summer of 1972 at a University of Michigan short course, has been a subject of interest to him ever since and is his principal avocation in retirement. Past president of the Eastern Penn Mushroomers, he is especially interested in photographing microfungi. He is also a long-time member of the New Jersey Mycological Association, to whose newsletter he has for more than 20 years contributed a column, 'Who's in a name?', in which individuals commemorated in fungal eponyms are profiled.