As you know, Chris and I went walking near the Neckar River last weekend – I’ve been posting photos I took from there all week. But we also took a walk down at the other end of town, to an area where there’s a huge hill that sometimes has sheep grazing on it. In the winter, kids sled down the hill.

As we walked by the bottom of the hill, we noticed a lone mushroom. Not just any mushroom. It was a huge, much bigger than a golfball-sized mushroom. I wanted to put something into the frame in order to give it is a sense of scale when I took its portrait. Chris kindly volunteered to provide his hat as wardrobe for my mushroom model.

When I played with the photos later, I noticed that my ‘shroom was posing in profile. I swear I did not add that “mouth” or the “eye” — either in real life or on the computer— to get that “face” under the hat.  Talk about being ready for his closeup – that mushroom is clearly angling to be a star. 😉 So, I made a few different versions of the photo just for fun while trying out some new dodging and burning techniques, as well as some other effects.

Enjoy.

P.S. In the odd way things happen,  as I was typing up the post what started  playing from my set-to-random-selection playlist in iTunes on my computer was the song Let me be your Star, which was oddly fitting for my mushroom and his pose today.  While that song was originally sung by 2 women (it’s from the recent TV show Smash), I actually like this version by Nick Pitera better. Not quite from a real Broadway show – it was written for the fictional musical created within the plotline of the show.

But here’s the song that was originally in my head when I titled this post: Good morning, Starshine. From Godspell, an honest-to-goodness Broadway show.

Well, you can’t expect me to keep selecting non-showtunes indefinitely, now can you.  😉