I have recently been working on mounting my first solo photo exhibition called Mushroom Ocean running at That Plant Shop Balmain, as part of Head On Photo Festival Open Program and because of this I have been reflecting on how the hero shot for the exhibition Pink Oyster Mushrooms Close Up came about. So here I will share the story of how I took this photo and a sneak peak behind the scenes of Mushroom Ocean.
Growing mushrooms at home: sustainable food ways
During the lock down my family started growing mushrooms in our spare half bathroom to be more sustainable and self sufficient with food. We grew all sorts of mushrooms from Pink Oysters to White, Grey, King Blue and Tan Oyster Mushrooms as well as ordinary Mushroom Caps and Shiitake Mushrooms. The spare bathroom had wooden mushroom shelves and mushroom compost block tubs installed being transformed into a mini mushroom farm. We had a near constant stream of fresh mushrooms to harvest and eat on toast and in pasta and any other way we could think of including Shiitake Infused Whiskey that I made into an Umami Hot Whiskey Toddy and later photographed and wrote about on Peck of Pickles. Shiitakes bring out chocolate notes in Whiskey due to their umami flavour enhancing properties.
The Pink Oysters moment & food art photos
At some point during the mushroom growing, harvesting and eating we all noticed something about the mushrooms – they were beautiful! In a sort of otherworldly coral and like floral way. The mushrooms seemed to me to be amazing underwater oceanic beings with the most incredible delicate and vivid colours and mesmerising textures and forms.
My camera had been put away for months of home schooling rarely making it out of the camera bag as I attended to daily chores like making bread and teaching my boys to read and write and draw and find any pleasure or beauty in the very mundane stuff of our lives inside our small townhouse. But one day I saw the pink oysters I was about to harvest, and I stopped, thinking to myself these are just too bright, too vivid, too alive not to photograph.
I had been reading online tutorials on how to do dark and moody food photography, and one suggestion had been to place food inside a box and to photograph as a flat lay with gentle shadows all around. With no space for a proper set up with the boys in the one room apartment all the time I thought I would give it a try so with only light from the window, an old wooden drawer and a piece of black velvet I set up our amazing Pink Oyster fruiting and started taking photos with the camera on a tripod. I took some of the whole fruiting as a flat lay and some from a 45 degree angle still on the velvet as well as some on a white distressed vintage bentwood chair I found one day on the side of the road. This chair turns up later in my photos of Yellow Oysters with gold velvet and is one of my favourite props.
The full fruiting disappeared into my editing as I found this single curling mushroom that looked like coral and had the most intricate texture of gills imaginable – this was my Pink Oyster Mushrooms Close Up – a crop of a larger photo. The 45 degree full fruiting is also a print in Mushroom Ocean, but the smaller mushroom on the chair is in my Shutterstock Mushrooms Collection as are all the photos in Mushroom Ocean.
Pink Oyster Mushrooms Close Up, 2021. Finalist World Food Photography Awards 2025, 3rd Place Cream of the Crop Category, Exhibited Mall Galleries & Fortnum’s 3’6 Bar London. Peck of Pickles Shutterstock Mushrooms Collection – Click here for photo licensing.
Sustainable food art practice
Many more photos of the mushrooms ensued during the lockdown and afterwards as what had been a sustainable food way adopted out of a space of desperation to make something better grew into something more – a sustainable food art practice where I photographed the mushrooms while they were still alive attached to their compost block growing medium and then harvested them, stored and cooked them. We still ate all the mushrooms and enjoyed eating them and watching them grow but something had changed I was now growing them to take photos of them. The technique remained little changed usually I photographed the mushrooms with natural light on a chair near the window and draped the compost block with velvet held in place with pins as I became more confident I experimented using gold as well as black velvet and I began using LED lighting to spotlight the textures and forms of the mushrooms. The photos of Yellow Oyster Mushrooms and White Oyster Mushrooms, Lion’s Mane Mushrooms and King Blue Oyster Mushrooms are all more like this, some are part of my Shutterstock Mushrooms Collection and some have also ended up as part of Mushroom Ocean which started with the Pink Oyster Mushrooms Close Up.
King Blue Oysters, Pink Oyster Waves & Central Detail of White Oyster Full Fruiting: Photos that almost made it into Mushroom Ocean but ended up standby photos in curation and are part of my Shutterstock Mushrooms Collection – click here for photo licensing.
Pink Oysters & Mushroom Ocean as Sustainable Food Photo Art
Pink Oyster Mushrooms Close Up is not just the star of Mushroom Ocean but has been exhibited in London at Mall Galleries and Fortnum’s 3’6 Bar as a Finalist in the World Food Photography Awards 2025, Placed 3rd in the Cream of the Crop Category. I could not have imagined that any of this would be possible from the simple wish to have more sustainable food, energy and time to put this into practice and take photos of the sheer beauty of the vivid living mushrooms but I could not be happier to have captured some of the vibrant pink and thrilling finely detailed texture of the Pink Oysters to share with you. It is my hope that the Pink OysterMushrooms Close Up and all the Mushroom Ocean photos move you to want to try new food flavours and textures and grow your own food at home and maybe even pick up your camera to take photos of everyday things we sometimes take for granted.
Mushroom Ocean Exhibition
Mushroom Ocean is showing at That Plant Shop Balmain as part of Head On Photo Festival from 13-20 November 2025 – for more Exhibition Details and more information about Head On Photo Festival check my Events page here.
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