Ancient Web: Hugh Smith Turned Mushroom Forays Into Field Albums

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

An independent mushroom website can work like a field notebook with particularly good photographs. Hugh Erle Smith made his a series of field notebooks.

Visit Hugh Smith's photography homepage

Smith introduces himself simply as a photographer with two overlapping interests: photography and searching for wild mushrooms. The landing page divides the collection into photographs from Fort Bragg, pictures from other areas, favorite forays, wildlife photography, and movies and slideshows.

His separate Dung Fungi catalogue has already been covered in this Ancient Web collection. The broader galleries are a different subject: thousands of small encounters with habitats, places, species, and people outside that one specialist category.

A Fort Bragg ascomycete page labels specimens with scientific names, dates, and sometimes common names. It includes Sarcosoma mexicana photographed on February 11, 2006, and Tuber gibbosum, the Oregon white truffle, on November 29, 2008. These details turn attractive pictures into records of particular observations.

The field trip is part of the science

The favorite-forays section also gives the collecting trips a narrative. An Alaska foray dated August 6–13, 2010 describes a group of twelve visitors at a fishing-and-hunting lodge. The account pauses to consider the strange length of Alaska's summer daylight, the cooler weather compared with California, and the impossible prospect of fitting all the mushrooms into a single week.

That shift between specimen identification and travel recollection is valuable. It shows the circumstances behind the photographs: people walking, searching, noticing, and returning to the same kinds of environments year after year.

The home page is not a machine-generated photo feed. Instead it offers simple groups of links, text captions, and individually organized picture pages. Some interior links did not load in the research browser, so the surviving indexed pages and examples are the evidence here, not a claim to have inspected the entire collection.

Smith retains copyright in the photographs. As a visitor, you can admire and learn from the material; using the images elsewhere requires attention to the photographer's permissions.

There is no need to pretend this is a full taxonomic database. It is an unusually patient personal nature gallery whose observations become historical records as the years pass.

Explore Smith's home page and the Alaska foray narrative.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.