About Us
Stephen Axford
Presenter and Special Effects Photography
STEPHEN AXFORD lives in the subtropical region of the NSW north coast in Australia. He is a world-renowned fungi photographer. His images and time-lapse videos of mushrooms have been featured in leading science and nature magazines and on TV screens across the globe.
Stephen was an ordinary bloke who after a career in IT retired in his late 50s and took up photography.
He developed a passion for photographing mushrooms which also fed his other great love – spending time in the forest.
The beauty and scientific accuracy of Stephen’s fungi photographs captivated national and international media, fungi experts and the general public, and he developed an on-line following numbering into the millions, stretching from Patagonia to Vladivostok.
Then Stephen with his partner and filmmaker Catherine Marciniak, began capturing the wonderful world of mushrooms in time-lapse photography.
Truth is these time-lapses are all created in a shipping container come studio called the "fungarium" on Stephen and Catherine's property in the subtropical hinterland near Byron Bay, Australia.
It was his exquisite time-lapses of a luminous fungi, Mycena chlorophos, that caught the eye of the BBC, who snapped it up to feature in David Attenborough’s, award-winning Planet Earth 2.
Stephen was discovered.
His fungi time-lapses have since featured in other celebrated nature documentaries including Our Planet, Hostile Planet, The Kingdom: How Fungi Made the World, Fantastic Fungi, Australian Odyssey, Carbon – the unauthorised biography, Giants, Islands, Green Planet and the iMax documentary FUNGI: Web of Life.
Stephen’s time-lapses also feature in Planet Fungi’s feature documentaries, Planet Fungi – North East India and Follow the Rain.
Stephen has presented many short docs of fungi field trips and fungi forest finds which you can find on Planet Fungi’s YouTube channel.
Catherine Marciniak
Director, Writer, Editor and Cinematographer
Catherine Marciniak has had a successful international career as a documentary director and cinematographer and as an ABC Features Reporter.
She is now focused on making documentaries about people who inspire and the extraordinary, beautiful and sometimes bizarre world of mushrooms.
Like Stephen she has always had a love of the outdoors. She has combined her filmmaking with her love of nature, as well as her insatiable curiosity about what makes us humans tick.
When you watch a Planet Fungi documentary, short or long, it is Catherine behind the camera and the person beavering away at the edit desk.
Prior to her obsession with fungi, she worked as a Features Reporter for the public broadcaster the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Before that she Series Produced the ABC’s Religion and Ethics program Compass and was an Independent Documentary for over 30 years.
Her credits include A Himalayan Vision, Steel City, Who Do You Think You Are?, The Life Series, Steel City, Grey Voyagers, Hospital-an unhealthy business, Dino Stampede, Babe in the Reeds and Beyond the Royal Veil. In her role as ABC Senior Features Reporter, she produced over 60 hours of TV current affairs programming, numerous digital articles, and radio packages.
She was a Finalist in the Walkley Awards for excellence in journalism in 2019 for her work on the documentary project Leagueability and was part of the regional NSW ABC team awarded a Walkley Award for coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires.
She is a co-writer of the iMax documentary FUNGI – the web of life.
Catherine shoots with a Sony Alpha 1 camera which she loves. The 8K capability was invaluable for collecting additional footage for the iMax film. The excellent low light capability is perfect for shooting in forest environments. Her two favourite go to lenses for fungi video work are the Sony 20mm wide angle which she uses both on a gimble and up close and wide, and a 50mm macro on her 2nd camera the Sony a7s.
Stephen uses a Sony a7R V camera and Sony 90mm macro lens for his field photography and Sony a7R II, a7R III and a7R IV cameras for time-lapse. These cameras perform particularly well in the lowlight forest environment and the high resolution is just brilliant for the macro work he does in the forest and in the fungarium.
Mycomedia
In their Planet Fungi documentaries Stephen (presenter) and Catherine (writer, cinematographer, director, editor) share the stunning beauty of fungi and how important it is to Life on the Earth, to bring more attention to this magnificent Kingdom of Life. They document mushrooms in some of the most remote forests across the planet. They help identify species new to science, and they explore why scientists now think fungi is critical to life on this planet.
Since 2015 Stephen and Catherine have collaborated with a number of universities, research organisations and NGO’s in China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Chile documenting the fungi in the forests in these countries to map biodiversity, to create educational materials such as field guides and exhibitions, to supply visual material for scientific papers and funding applications. The fungi field trips have been in collaboration with some of the world’s foremost mycologists, including Prof Don Pfister from Harvard University, Genevieve Gates University of Tasmania, the mycology team at the Kunming Institute of Botany, Dr Tom May of the National Herbarium of Victoria and Giuliana Furci and the Fungi Foundation.
Since 2015 Stephen and Catherine have collaborated with a number of universities, research organisations and NGO’s in China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Chile documenting the fungi in the forests in these countries to map biodiversity, to create educational materials such as field guides and exhibitions, to supply visual material for scientific papers and funding applications. The fungi field trips have been in collaboration with some of the world’s foremost mycologists, including Prof Don Pfister from Harvard University, Genevieve Gates University of Tasmania, the mycology team at the Kunming Institute of Botany, Dr Tom May of the National Herbarium of Victoria and Giuliana Furci and the Fungi Foundation.
For Stephen and Catherine these partnerships are a significant way to share the story of fungi and how it is vital to life on the planet. The reputation Stephen has developed has in recent years led to collaborations with international universities and conservation organisations to photograph and document fungi in some of the most remote forests on the planet.
This has given Stephen and Catherine extraordinary access to places travellers don’t normally see. And they get to spend time with villagers and inspiring young scientists we don’t normally meet.
Stephen and Catherine’s work has also been exhibited in the Contemporary Gallery of Art in Kunming, China, in Australia Geographic’s multi-screen production in museums internationally “Our County”, in the permanent exhibition at Questacon in Canberra and “White Night Shepparton” – digital projection event.
“Without fungi there would be no forests”
— Stephen Axford, Photographer & Presenter