How to take a good picture for mushroom identification

Fresh morels for sale this Sunday and wrapping up our summer update!!

This post was a bonus post inspired by our recent update.

If you’re curious about morels but not feeling up to foraging them yourself, don’t worry.

Even though we claimed we wouldn’t have fresh mushrooms at the farmer’s market, we’ll have them for sale at our next market. Come see us at Sport Hill Farm this Sunday and we’ll have burned morels from Idaho for sale (until we sell out, obviously.) Sometimes the unexpected happens at the markets!

This is the same box you will see at Sport Hill Farm if you get there in time.

We get sent a lot of pictures by customers asking what kind of mushroom is in the photo. We almost never know. It’s not because it's impossible to know. A lot of it is how the picture was taken.

Sometimes you find a mushroom in your yard and want to find out if you can eat it. There are universities that will help you identify mushrooms with a photo and there’s a nifty Facebook group for it as well. (This is the only one we recommend from experience by the way…)

On that note, here’s a snippet from our upcoming iNaturalist Mini Course:

A good photo of a mushroom for identification has four parts.

The top

Instinctively, folks seem to sense the importance of a mushroom cap, or the top of the mushroom. This is mostly all we get sent if we are sent a photo. Yes, you need this view. But, keep going!

James holds a mushroom someone brought to him for identification. Can you guess what it is?

The underside

Almost no one thinks to include this shot. Many mushrooms show their differences in tiny details. The underside of the mushrooms vary wildly. Take a photo.

The profile

We need to see the stem. Sometimes there are identifying things on the side of a mushroom (or fungus, not all of them are mushrooms). Take a picture from the side.

The environment

We need to see more than the mushroom. Where did you find it? What was nearby? Take a picture of the environment where the mushroom was found.

This was found in a horse’s stall. (What??!? We think it’s Shiitake… so far)

Taking these four shots will get you much closer to an accurate identification of your mushroom. Whether you’re using iNaturalist, the Facebook group linked above, or if you’re texting James.

No promises on that last option though.

Show us your mushie finds in the comments!!!!

See you at Sport HIll Farm this Sunday from 10 am to 2 pm!