st patty's day

My friend called and asked if I wanted to go downtown to the St. Patrick's Day parade. Having a dislike of intense [drunk] crowds where there is a lot of drinking [did I mention drunks?], I've never gone to it before but hey, there's a first time for everything and I had nothing else terribly pressing that day that couldn't wait til the next day.

I love going downtown if I don't have to worry about parking. I like walking around window shopping, people watching, and searching out unusual architectural details-of which there's a lot. Cleveland has more old buildings still standing and it's fun to search them out.

We arrived at Tower City, the refurbished building that once housed the train and bus terminals and still holds RTA-our cable car, transit, train, Metro-whatever you want to call it, they all end at the Tower City Terminal on Public Square. As we were walking out, the ornate windows framed the newer buildings outside and it made a neat picture but, try as I might, I couldn't get the inside and outside to expose at the same time. I knocked off a few shots of the different windows and we left.

Here's the photo of the inside of the terminal. I'm learning my way around photoshop lately and am getting pretty good at some things...to the point where I can take a person's smiling face from one shot and cover the one with their eyes half closed in the other shot.

In this picture, I took the window from the one photo and stuck it in the window of another shot. They were two different windows with two different angles so I had to play with the perspective. That turned out fine but there really should be just one light-I'm not good enough yet to clone out the second one when its in such a patterned area. I could have cropped the photo above the window, but then you'd lose the ornate ceiling, which is the point of the whole picture.

I would really like to go back and take the photo again-and this time, take the same window with both exposures.

After we left here, we were to meet our friends at the House of Blues where they were having free concerts all day.

This photo is of the pit in front of the stage-they were throwing beads and things out. It was loud and a bit crazy...no, it was LOUD and crazy. At one point, I had to move to around the corner as my chest hurt from the loud bass. I felt like my heart itself hurt from trying to beat against the pressure of those bass speakers.
I worked at the House of Blues last fall doing photography and I never saw it as crazy as this during any of the concerts. This was like a mini-spring break. One girl in the front row took her T-shirt off and tossed it to the DJ-a DJ for Pete's sake, not even a live band!-and kept dancing without a shirt on until he eventually tossed it back.
This shot shows the people (at a quieter point) but there were just so many people! (You can tell I haven't been out much lately)

After a while we left to watch the parade. No good pictures there, but I like the two I took of a couple vendors. Maybe that's more descriptive of what it's about anyway.


I love this last shot-the crowds of people streaming by, the look on the vendor's face...the hope of making a good buck and being disappointed..I so hope he made out later.

So that was my first St. Patrick's Day. And yes, I ate corned beef sandwich but no, I didn't drink any beer, green or otherwise.

But all I could think of was, all those empty bottles...