"Lens Flare" - Settings: ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/100 sec, 23mm (18-55mm lens)

Adam and I had a lovely relaxing Saturday yesterday.  We sort of pretended we were on vacation – even though we didn’t leave the East Village.  We cooked a nice breakfast, went to the nursing home so Adam could meet all my little old friends, and then we spent a couple hours lying around Tompkins Square Park.  I was reading my Guide du Fromage and Adam was working on achieving world domination – playing Civilization on his iphone.  It was such a gorgeous day and the sun was shining so brightly through the trees.  I was having some fun with my camera experimenting with capturing lens flare.  This was my favorite lens flare shot of the day.  This photo is cropped a LOT – as I totally wanted to zoom in on the magic that was happening in the center of the picture.   Isn’t it beautiful?

The park was enjoyable except for a couple unfortunate incidents.  First, a bird pooped on me.  I felt something hit my side as I was lying down reading, and I looked down and there it was… poop.  Ew.  I got mad at Adam because he was barely paying attention to me as I figured out a way to remove the poop from my shirt.  He was too busy conquering the Egyptians to worry about my poop situation.  Real nice.  Then, there was this crazy man in the park who was sitting near us.  I was sort of fascinated by him at first and was enjoying observing him.  At one point, he got in this woman’s face about something and became super hostile and scary until she walked away to go tell the police.  They never came.  A little while later he started a fight with another guy.  He was seriously imbalanced – a total live wire.  I wanted to keep watching him (it was like watching a riveting movie) but I was afraid he’d see me staring and come attack me or something so I kept my face buried in my book and stole glances every couple minutes.  Thankfully he left shortly after and we finished off the rest of our afternoon at the park without incident.