It's that time of the year when I start wandering around woodlands staring into bushes.

Apparently it’s called macro photography.

I’m still learning new techniques, which means quite a lot of experimenting, getting things wrong, changing settings, moving the camera half an inch, changing them again and then discovering that whatever I was trying to photograph has either moved, flown away or simply become bored of me.

There’s also a surprising amount of time spent crouched motionless beside paths, staring intensely at tiny things while walkers pass by giving me increasingly concerned looks.

This is why I wear a bright red coat.

Not because it’s particularly good outdoor clothing.

It’s basically my way of saying:

“It’s fine. I’m a photographer. I’m not hiding in this bush.”

Although, admittedly, kneeling in wet leaves while pointing a camera underneath a rotting log probably isn’t doing much to support that argument.

Finding subjects is another challenge.

Macro photography changes the way you walk through woodland. You stop looking at the view and start staring at the ground, examining tree stumps, turning around to look underneath leaves and occasionally taking a sudden interest in something that everyone else would quite reasonably walk straight past.

Most of the time I’m slowly scanning the ground in a manner that suggests I’ve dropped my keys, lost a contact lens or perhaps misplaced something extremely valuable somewhere underneath a fern.

Fortunately, I’m rarely alone.

The ants seem delighted to finally have someone showing an interest in their work. They’re constantly on the move, completely ignore any attempt at composition and seem determined to walk out of frame precisely when I press the shutter.

The midges and mosquitoes are even friendlier.

They normally arrive within minutes and provide a useful sense of urgency whenever I’m taking too long over a shot.

Their feedback is generally along the lines of:

“Oh look! A meal”

Nothing improves your camera technique quite like trying to manually focus on something a few millimetres across while being eaten alive.

Of course, the whole idea of this is to find new subjects and expand the sort of macro photography I’m doing.

And I am.

Sort of.

I keep looking for insects, interesting textures, tiny plants, patterns, strange things hiding under leaves and all those wonderful little details that you normally never notice.

Then I looked through my recent photographs.

They’re all fungi.

Again.

Big fungi. Tiny fungi. Strange fungi. Colourful fungi. Fungi growing on trees. Fungi growing underneath trees. Fungi that I’ve almost certainly photographed before but somehow convinced myself looked completely different this time.

Sorry.

Still, that’s probably the thing I’m enjoying most about macro photography.

It forces you to slow down and actually look.

A patch of woodland you’ve walked through dozens of times suddenly contains hundreds of potential photographs, most of them only a few centimetres tall and quite happy to go unnoticed.

Well, apart from the mosquitoes.

They definitely want to be noticed.

So if you see a bloke in a bright red coat crawling around woodland, staring underneath leaves, being eaten alive by midges and photographing yet another mushroom…

Nothing suspicious going on.

Probably.