Lens-Artists Challenge #366: City Mouse/Country Mouse

Lens-Artists Challenge #366: City Mouse/Country Mouse

This post has been a 'work in progress' for a couple of weeks now. I had started it the week of the Challenge,  and went out with a few cameras specifically to make some city/country crossover images. But then I had a (minor) health thing and it was difficult to get to the lab to get the film developed. But we're back! So here's my take on Lens-Artists Challenge #366: City Mouse/Country Mouse (https://travelsandtrifles.wordpress.com/2025/09/20/lens-artists-challenge-366-city-mouse-country-mouse/). It was Tina's turn to host the Challenge, and on her blog, Travels and Trifles, she wrote, 'some of the ... sights along my daily walk reminded me of the classic Aesop fable “City Mouse/Country Mouse”. If you’re unfamiliar with the story, its moral is that no matter how appealing someone else’s life may seem, there really is no place like home.'

We live in a small village on the outskirts of the town of Oiã in Portugal. Actually,  it's a bit of an overstatement to call it a 'village' as there are no shops at all, just a roundabout, the café next door, and a cluster of houses along the roads. From the roundabout ('rotunda' in Portuguese) we can either walk in the direction of Oiã, or towards the next village of Águas Boas (here, there be dragons 😉), or along a road that leads to the Zon Industrial de Oiã. Behind the houses, in all directions, are fields, and the remains of the woodlands that I still derive a lot of pleasure from wandering around. 

I reckon we're closer to the idea of the 'country mouse' of the fable, and yes it's certainly nice to go to the 'city' from time to time. For us the city is really Aveiro, with its famous canals, but I'm a beach person now, and the places that we most like to visit are the beach towns of Barra and Vagueira. So my intention for this Challenge was to take a couple of unusual cameras and films, and have a wander around these towns. The camera and film combinations were the Horizon 202, a Russian swing lens panoramic camera from the 1990s, and Lomochrome Turquoise film, and the Zeiss Ikon Nettar 517/16, a medium format folding camera from the 1950s, with a roll of Harman Red redscale film.

Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here (https://photobyjohnbo.com/about-lens-artists/), and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag 'Lens-Artists'.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the 'Snapshot' WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com@keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#CityMouseCountryMouse, #Aesop #Fable, #LensArtists, Lens-Artists, #Challenge, #Redscale, #Panorama, #Urban, #Country, #ColourShift,