Joel Leske, The beauty of fungus (SINGLE SHOT 2022)

I was walking through a local forest and stumbled across a rotting tree branch. When I looked at it closely, I could see these tiny little yellow bits of fungus scattered across the branch. Thinking they looked really beautiful on the decaying tree, I took this series of over 100 focus stacked images to create this incredible detail. It was only when I got home and combined all the images together that I could really see how beautiful this was. It reminds me of coral with its sponge-like textures and I love the way the sunlight reflects on the yellow edges.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.