Downtown Minneapolis

This summer has gone much quicker than any other I've previously lived in my short 30 years. Okay, so that's my excuse for neglecting my blog when there have been so many photo opps the past few months.

In July a friend and I ventured to downtown Minneapolis for a free comedy skit at Brit's, lunch on The Local's patio, and some wandering about looking like tourists during downtime. I've never really acted like a tourist in Minneapolis (or St. Paul, for that matter) so it was fun to have an excuse to be down there with my SLR snapping shots.

While I have no clue of the names of the different buildings (other than the IDS tower), I like shiny, reflective surfaces on big buildings and the lighting was good for it that day. We had great food at The Local - along with good chats - and the show at Brit's was funny and free. Well, what we could hear of it was funny...we were trying to stay cool in the shade so ended up at the back of the audience but a good time was had nonetheless.

I'm especially proud of my shot of The Man. While strolling through a plaza near Brit's, I glanced over and happened to see an old man sitting on a concrete step looking at a waterfall. There were some girls nearby and I had to take 3 or 4 images before I finally got the winner. I did crop the image to look like this, but think it works very well. The judges at the Crow Wing County Fair thought so, too - this shot took 1st in the Black & White Adult (1) category and 'Champion' for the overall category (B&W and color together).

At first glance a sparrow we saw on the ground seemed to be injured, as it turns out I think he was begging for food because he ended up flying off after we didn't deliver. I'm not a huge fan of birds, but that's probably the closest I've ever been to a non-injured wild bird before.

The afternoon's activities were coming to a close and as we were heading back to the car we ran into a 16-year-old girl who was lost. After guiding her to Hard Rock to meet her friends, loath to end the day we decided to head to happy hour.

We chose O'Donovan's and as we were waiting to cross the street, we ran into a couple VERY drunk guys who were looking for a strip club. While we didn't know where the establishment was, we had fun BSing with them and a nice police officer ended up walking them to some other strib club. After sitting down on O'Donovan's patio, we discovered The Seville - the club the guys were looking for - was right next door.

It was a great day - beautiful weather, lots of talking, good food. Hopefully I'll find the time to venture to Minneapolis again this summer to play tourist!