The first picture I've chosen for my blog is by one of my favorite artists, Salvador Dali. I love this image for several reasons. First, it is quite surreal, as Dali's work usually is, but this is especially interesting because it is a photograph rather than paint on canvas. Second, the amount of work that went into setting up and actually capturing a shot like this is astounding. The cats and splash of water had to be timed just right, and turned out beautifully. Third, the composition of the shot itself is interesting. There is a lot of action in the shot, but it is all evenly spaced out, giving each thing in the frame room to be interesting without being cluttered.
The second image is of a staircase in early Soviet Russia. I really like this picture because we usually think about photographs as being snapshots of individual moments in time, an illusion that is destroyed by the dozens of ghostly workers shuffling past the camera. Only the stone and steel of the staircase and buildings in the background stand still, mirroring how these things will endure, at least in comparison to individual, ephemeral human life.
