Andrés Miguel's Image

It was a cold, foggy, drizzly day – perfect conditions for searching for and photographing the many types of fungi pushing up through the fallen leaves on the forest floor of Los Alcornocales Natural Park in Andalucía, southern Spain.

‘It had been a very wet year, and the atmosphere in the woodland was wonderful,’ says Andrés. ‘I love photographing fly agaric fungi, but I’d never tried using a wide-angle lens to capture the perspective in this way before.’ To do so required spending some time lying in the leaf-litter in the rain, not just to get on eye-level with the fruiting bodies but also to show the overarching, ancient, pollarded Andalucían oak in the background. The fungal fruiting bodies are produced by a vast web of mycelium threads – the main body of the fungus – spread through the soil and leaf-litter and living in association with trees, in this case, birch.