The first day of really nice summer weather. A friend and I decided on a socially distanced lunch meeting at a local park. All of the picnic tables have been removed, annoyingly, as an anti-Covid measure, but the park does have one bench secured in a concrete slab that is still in place. And so we took our sandwiches and coffees there.
All four of these photos are taken from this bench, looking downstream. When we first got there, the air was still cool and very still. I have always been fascinated by reflections and so I took one shot as a reference and then zoomed in on the best of the reflections. One of the most intriguing things about the outburst of spring in our part of the world is the variance of shades of green, and I think this second photo captures that quite nicely.
This is the mid range of the telephoto in my small camera, a Coolpix P7000, that I use a lot because it fits in my purse or pocket and has a wrist strap, handy when holding a sandwich in the other hand or a walking pole or whatever.
As I put the camera down, my friend, who does not like snakes, spotted this charmer forging upstream against the current. He, or she I guess, is barely visible, except for the wake, but this is the extreme of the magnification the Coolpix will do. My friend was glad it was not closer. There were four of them, as we watched, and they all went happily by us.
There were no bugs, also happily. And no one bugged us for using the bench.
