An Award-Winning Exploration of Craft: Dan Saelinger’s Mushroom Series

It’s easy for a commercial artist to get wrapped up in professional projects, so they don’t take time to explore personal ones. Photographer and Director Dan Saelinger tries to take any downtime he has to create on his own in his home studio. While at the farmer’s market this summer, he was inspired by a stand selling all varieties of mushrooms that visually were odd, architectural and vibrant.

Though Dan enjoys experimenting with AI tools and manipulating images using CGI, he took this project back to his roots. He spent hours with each image, sculpting the light, dialing in color using gels and working entirely in-camera on these macro images. Though the mushrooms themselves are rooted in nature, Dan’s design direction transforms them to feel otherworldly. The images celebrate the idea that with the right attention and care of craft, even the most everyday subjects can become something extraordinary. And now, this project has earned recognition from Graphis, Communication Arts and Lürzer’s Archive.

What inspired this project?

I found these beautiful mushrooms at a farmer’s market—strange, colorful, sculptural. I’m always drawn to objects that feel like they have their own personality, and mushrooms have this wild, almost alien architecture. I knew immediately they’d be an incredible subject to explore through lighting, color, and composition.

Also, commercial shoots move fast. It’s common to shoot nine or ten images in a day. This project was the opposite. I spent six or seven hours on each shot, truly dialing in the lighting and composition. It reminded me how much beauty can come from giving an object your full attention.

You’ve been experimenting with AI and CGI in other projects. Why return to something so purely photographic here?

AI and CGI are tools I’m curious about because they’re part of our visual world now. But at the end of the day, I’m a craftsperson. I went to school to be a photographer. I love the pure medium. This project was a chance to slow down, reset, and reconnect with the fundamentals: composition, lighting, and color. No shortcuts, no digital tricks, just the medium itself.

The images feel very detailed and intimate. What did the technical process look like?

Initially, I started this project as more of a documentary-style process. Throughout the fall, I’d visit the market weekly to pick up a variety of mushrooms to bring into my studio. I’d then simply place one on a white surface in front of my Phase One medium format camera with a 80mm lens. This quickly felt flat, boring and rather monotonous. Switching my lens to a Schneider 120 Macro immediately brought intimacy to the composition. Being so close not only heightened the details but also gave the mushrooms a more exotic, alien-like feel.

My lighting setup consisted of a Broncolor Sunlamp behind a piece of 210 Lee diffusion in a 3x4 frame as a key light to give an overall pop to the image and defining shadow structure. Using reflectors with grids and a variety of gels I’d place 3-4 more lights at different angles to apply the gel color on both the mushrooms and the background. A softbox was placed overhead to softly illuminate the image and blend the color together. Lighting isn’t a precise science for me, it's much more about exploring possibilities, experimentation and discovery, and with digital photography, you can continually iterate on set quickly. When I finally land on the right illumination of the subject, it's really an aha moment.

What do you hope people take away from the series?

There is still immense value in the fundamentals. Lighting, composition, and color are the backbone of all image-making, whether I’m using AI, CGI, or a macro lens and a mushroom. It’s about creativity in the photographic medium's simplest form and making decisions in the frame and spending time in the minutia of it all. It served as a reminder that a great image doesn't need to have an incredibly elaborate process. It’s about finding something magical in seeing via the craft of it all.