Sometimes your first image is your best image. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it's what caught your eye in the first place. There's an immediacy to it that you lose in the following shots by trying to line things up and design the shot better. Sometimes a little bit of something 'off' gives just a bit of tension that makes it all fall together.

In this case, the main subject is juxtaposed against the flowers in front of it, but also connected to them by the colors. Beneath the flowers is earth. Beneath the gas pump is earth (and gasoline tanks). The sky is grey, and the pump is backlit, but it still pops out at you because of the bright colors. It's eye-catching advertising - who can argue.

But in the background the grey of the truck and the rust-colored red of the barn reflecft a more natural world. In the middle, electrical wires break up the grey of the sky.

It doesn't really make a comment on anything, it's just a reflection of the way things are, but I think that if you look at it closely and find those things on your own it should get you thinking.

I think this is an interesting pic regardless of the Obama connection. And I thought about photoshopping it to give it some desaturated/decrepit effect but I changed my mind. I think that it's good as it is, even though you can't actually get a sense of how decrepit it really is. You can see that the whites are reflecting the blue of the sky, and that it's real. And that reality is what gives it integrity.

I've done a lot of photos of mannequins. At Tyler one of my teachers told me "I've seen photos of mannequins before, but never ones that were done so lovingly". And she was right. It was a series of female mannequins and I'd been kind of enamored with their beauty, even though they weren't real. I shot them in soft light at dusk, and printed them so that they were soft with pastel colors. They almost looked like real women 'dressed' as mannequins. I avoided any reflections, and I think that eliminated a barrier, making it seem 'closer'.

A lot of my other ones are more about the reflection in the window than the mannequin itself, but I felt there was something kind of creepy about this kid. He seems angry at first glance, but then kind of lost. Kind of damaged. And I almost feel as if it appears there's a connection between him and the woman behind him (sister? mother?). It's as if she's watching over him, but at the same time if you look at her eyes it's like she's looking away from him. That's what makes the photo work. Well, that and that fact that these are implied interactions between stationary objects that infer emotion because they're designed to look like people.