Bukit TImah Nature Reserve Fungi #3

Fungi that are growing at eye level are a lot easier to photograph. The light is better, the angles that I can shoot from are more varied and it is less taxing on my back and knees. Maybe these are fairy cups planted for midnight parties for characters out of Midsummer Night's Dream.

After the party

Ughhhhm, my head feels terrible and I feel sick.

Oh, it's morning already. Where am I?

Hmmm, check out my hair, is it all right?

I can't seem to walk straight, I need a little help here.

That's what fighting can do to your face.

Okay, here comes the police to check us out, steady everyone.

Run baby run, these fellas want to have us for lunch.

Bukit Timah Nature Reserve #2

When taking photos of a model, the photographer gives instructions to her to elicit the kind of feeling or mood that is desirable for that particular photo-shoot. When taking pictures of flowers and fungi, I wish sometimes that I could get them to do my bidding especially in photographing fungi because they are usually found away from the mainstream of people, sometimes hidden by leaves or the ground between me and the fungi could be mushy and wet. Since this is only wishful thinking, I have no choice most of the time but step on the mud, duck under branches and pray that I will not step on a snake or a creepy crawlie. These fungi look like they were just planted right where I wanted them to be. Actually, I had to brave swarms of mosquitoes, the mud and moving a little out of the trail to get these shots. No regrets for my 'models' were worth all the inconvenience I had to bear with.

Bukit Timah fungi #1

A Sunday morning walk along one of the trails at the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve to look for fungi turned out to be a fruitful one. We saw different types of fungi and had a field day photographing them. As part of the trail we took was also a cycling trail we had to be especially wary of folks on thundering down the slope on their two-wheelers.

Spindle Ginger

A walk along Senapang Road in the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve this morning brought several rewards in the form of a variety of fungi growing on the rain-soaked logs and truncated tree trunks on either side of the trail. The prize 'catch' was the sighting of a bright red ginger that I recall seeing on the January issue of Gardenwise, the newsletter of the Singapore Botanic Gardens. We spotted three of these colourful 'spindles' but they did not have any flowers in the bracts and all three ginger plants were growing on slopes.