"Glass must be full." I don't know what that is supposed to mean in the context of a gas pump, but taken—probably completely incorrectly—as an optimistic directive it's kind of nice. Especially considering the grayness and cold temperature of the day.

But this is an accidental interpretation, one that I didn't notice until I came back to the image several days later, and that I'm now forcing onto it. Really, I just liked the texture of the paint on the gas pump and hoped I could find an interesting angle. I wonder how often the meaning we find in art is like that—accidental, forced. Often? If so, what does that mean?

OK, now I'm really wandering. I'll stop.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 DX lens, in manual exposure mode. Aperture f/8, shutter 1/30, ISO 400. Post-processing in Aperture 3: curve for highlight recovery and contrast.

Thoughts for improvement: Couple of things here. First, the sky is very uninteresting. This is in part because by metering for the pump, the sky was overexposed, and although I was able to bring it back down because I shot in RAW format, it's still very flat. It's also in part because it was a cold, gray day, and the sky was actually boring. The other thing is that this would probably have been better with a wide-angle lens—18 mm or shorter, most likely.