Aw snap

The day I took my DSLR out for its maiden voyage was the first time I saw a place I'd been looking at for years. To long-time readers and to the folks that read my photography blog, I apologize for making you look at these pictures yet again :).
I took my camera out that day to try to capture the dancing fountain at the Terminal Tower in Cleveland. Sadly, it wasn't so much dancing that day as drizzling.

So that the day wouldn't be a total loss, I decided to practice on mundane things - hand rails and ceiling tiles and such. It started with this accidental self-portrait. 

Can you spot the hidden Brigid?

And then this random decoration in a railing.

 I couldn't believe I'd never noticed the designs in all the grates.

 Or the elegant lines of the rapid station I'd rushed through a hundred times.

 I'd stood waiting for elevators and never even glanced at the doors.

 I'd walked past this mural a hundred times and never so much as registered it was there.

 I've stood at this spot waiting impatiently for a hundred buses and somehow never looked at what I was seeing.

A security guard saw me taking pictures, and pointed at things I'd looked at but never seen, told me what settings to use to best capture the light here, and reduce glare there. He told me the history of a building where I'd spent hundreds of hours of my life shopping, waiting, eating, killing time with friends. That day changed the way I saw the things around me forever.