I suppose at first glance this appears to be a somewhat out-of-focus photograph of a two-toned bus.

For me, this is a photograph that calls into question the nature of photography itself, and perhaps the very nature of our understanding of reality. It's a photograph that touches upon certain tenents of science, yet it also expresses the near magical quality of discovery paradoxically based on empirical experience. And there's a question of whether it's still possible to have a free lunch, or at least a 'burger with both mustard and ketchup.

It is a fuzy picture of a bus. Or is it? I ask the question because, in the photograph, the top half of a derelict school bus (once owned by the Church of Scientology, and now taking up temporary residence in a junk yard in Barstow, California) was visible to me as a smeary-looking reflection. Put another way, the "bus" was no more than a ghostly, mirrored image of a real bus, which I photographed in a thin sheen of rain water on the hood of an old, orange jeep.

The "real" bus was visible, too, just beyond the jeep. By crouching down behind the jeep a bit, I was able to photograph the top half of the bus in reflection. At same time, I was able to include part of the lower portion of the "real" bus, including the yellow panels and headlights, in the viewfinder of my camera. I realized - from experince looking at reflections - that I could position myself so that what I saw in reflection - the top half of the orange "bus" - would be aligned in my viewfinder with the bottom of the "real" yellow school bus.

Then I flipped the photograph upside down, so that it appears to be right-side-up. That is, the upper, orange part of the bus was, in the original photograph, upside down (as are all images in reflection in water). Conversely, the lower part of this photograph, the yellow portion of the bus, is now also upside down, since, in the original photograph, it was right-side-up. However, because my photograph includes just the headlights and a small portion of the rest of the bottom portion of the "real" bus, the entire photograph seems to be right-side-up.

This is, then, a photograph of what looks like a two-toned bus, i.e. the yellow bus itself, mated to the reflection of the bus in the hood of the jeep.

Is the upper (lower?) part of the orange bus any less real than the "real" bus? Does this photograph depict one, almost whole bus? Is it a photograph of two parts of one bus? Or does the reflection take on a life of its own, making this a photograph of not one, but rather two buses?

Even the "real" bus is simply the reflection of light rays from the sun bouncing back into a lens, light rays which are then focused by the lens on the sensor of my camera. The reflected orange bus is a sort of cousin-bus, a reflection once-removed from the "real" bus.

Do I have both mustard and ketchup on my hamburger? Did I make one photograph, or two photographs for the price of one?