Rusty keys on church window.

I found these keys on the wire grill of the village church's stained glass windows. It made me wonder about what their story was...

The keys are clearly for two different locks and they look like cabinet or box keys, though perhaps a small door key too... how strange.

For the Smile on Saturday group's theme this week Title Wanted.

Please suggest titles that I could use and I'll change the title to something suggested. Thanks :)

Thank you for taking the time to look I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Smile on Saturday!

[Handheld in daylight.
Developed in Photolab.
Nik Perspective Efex.
USM sharpening in Affinity.
Silver Efex didn't work so I used Color Efex with more than half a dozen filters including Vintage Film, Bicolor, Vignette and Blur Vignette.]

Tags:   iron outdoors fence no person security cage steel rusty nature old wire lock rust protection horizontal pattern vertical keys Smile on Saturday title wanted

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So why the erratic routing for this path?

I have a deep suspicion it’s to do with local pubs. My village has one and so does the next door one. This is the path between them (it also involves an almost 500-foot climb!). So if you are doing a pub-crawl involving both pubs in one night, what can you expect?

Or it could be the cattle avoiding the trees and the brambles of course, but that would be a tad boring.

It’s probably not the Romans because they thought in straight lines. I mention the Romans as a real option though - a significant Roman temple has been discovered in the woods just on the left (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uley). I think they preferred the local wine anyway, rather than the village-brewed beer.

This is for the Smile on Saturday groups Autumn Joy theme this week, taken on a walk a few days ago. No, I was remarkably sober at the time...

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Smile on Saturday! Happy Autumn Joy!!

[Handheld in sunlight. Developed in Capture One for colour. Final tweaks in Affinity (16:9 crop; USM sharpening - High Pass was awful - and soft dark vignette.]

Tags:   nikon z 6 Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8G fall leaf season nature wood landscape maple tree park branch outdoors environment scenery scenic colour flora rural countryside no person Autumn Autumn Joy HSoS joy Smile on Saturday

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Dog rose.

One of the things I really like about the Smile on Saturday group, apart from the lovely people of course, are the varied themes that are not too narrow or prescriptive.

But I would remonstrate with the admins this week. The theme of Over-Processed has wreaked havoc with my addiction management programme...

I took this on one of my local walks, a hedgerow flower. It’s either a rose or a bramble - I get them confused being, as I am, a bear of very little brain.

But the rose made for a more smiley title, so it’s definitely that.

Over-cooked in Nik Color Efex with a melange of filters including Solarisation, Infra Red, and Bi-color filters (that’s bicolour if you speak English proper like).

But there was more - if you are (astoundingly) that interested, just ask and I’ll send you the preset I made for it.

I’ll post a link to the in-camera image in the first comment so you can see how far we came :)

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope the image makes you smile. Or at least that the title does ;) Happy Smiley Saturday!

Tags:   nikon z 6 Nikon AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED HSoS Nik Color Efex over-processed Rose Smile on Saturday

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In the days before Christmas the family team was given a mission which involved the tactical extraction of daughter from the Covid infested East of England and the repatriation of her to... the Covid infested West of England.

The mission went well but we ran into foul weather on the way back. You can see the raindrops on the windscreen.

Hardly a smiley subject for the Smile on Saturday theme today of One Point Perspective. But you may smile as you imagine a rather bored Peter playing with his phone camera on the front seat. And, no, I wasn't driving...

This was a long exposure handheld, taken in raw DNG by the phone and processed in Capture One/Affinity Photo. (I seem to have lost the EXIF data in the processing - sorry!)

The red stripes on the left are us overtaking a lorry with lots of taillights. The white on the right is caused by the headlights of the oncoming traffic on the other carriageway.

For all that I think the image well illustrates the mucky night and the perspective effect of roads and motion for the theme.

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Smile on Saturday!!!!

Tags:   smile on saturday one point perspective long exposure night lines perspective driving roads rain bad weather handheld motion red

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I don’t collect many things but I have long held a peculiar attraction to boxes. I particularly like unsophisticated carved wooden ones. These days I am not allowed to acquire more because of lack of space (though I do slip the odd one in under the radar every few years - Shhhh, don’t tell now...).

This box was hand-crafted in India and bought from a fair trade charity. It is of particular significance to me because it was an essential part of a parenting experiment that we did.

When my daughter was young we didn’t give her any pocket money. Instead, we had this box which was alway kept topped up with coins. She could take whatever she liked from it and spend it on what she wanted, though the agreement was that she would put any change from her purchase at the shop back in the box.

We did this because we hoped create a learning experience for her. In our society money is immensely important and I have always felt that being able to budget and manage money is essential for a young person to learn. Self-control in spending money is an important lesson too.

And values are particularly important as the ones we hold largely determine what we do with our lives and the impact we have on others. So we wanted to stop money being a control issue and an addictively desirable object for acquisition.

And the sorts of values we wanted to instil were ones like money only has value when you spend it and that it is meant to be useful or enjoyable, it’s for sharing, it’s a responsibility to be stewarded wisely, that the value of a person is not measured by their wealth but by the quality of their character (to borrow some famous words) and their integrity, that contentment is a better aim in life than success, that financial security does not mean having lots of money but that your income exceeds your expenditure, and, finally, that there is a tremendous amount of fun to be had in giving money away.

And with that rather lofty aim, we could only fail.

Except we didn’t. But I suspect that was more to do with our daughter’s personality (which parents don’t really control) rather than our experiment.

So that’s the story of this particular box. It’s still in use today as a change store, but in these days of contactless pandemics even that is on the decline.

I wasn’t feeling very imaginative today so you have a straight-down shot of the lid. I did try some other viewpoints but nothing was working. To add a bit of interest I used a lighting filter in the processing to add two lights top left and bottom right.

This is for the Smile on Saturday theme Money Box

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Smile on Saturday :)

Tags:   Smile on Saturday HSoS SoS Money Box wooden carving brass craft money box

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