About Gil Davis

Gil Davis, an Atherton-based freelance reporter, was taken with the mannequin he saw in a fabric store display one night while strolling the streets of Vienna. He had brought his new digital camera with him, and whipped it out to take a photo. Davis described the mannequin's face as "haunting."

Click on photo for larger image.

"A person can wonder if the mannequin is thinking about wearing that jacket, or, whatever a person wants to imagine, I guess," he said, referring to the jacket visible to the right in the photo.

Davis, who has been living in Atherton for 14 years, is an associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, a 25-year-old non-profit. Although he has had occasion to use his photography skills on the job, Davis mostly considers himself a hobbyist.

That September vacation was his first experience with a digital camera, and he was impressed.

"I found my new digital camera was very easy to use and obtained quite sharp images even though it was mostly being handheld."

His decision to enter the Weekly's contest was not motivated by this photograph but rather by a series of up-close photos he had been taking of flowers.
"Almost everybody I showed them to thought they were really exceptional." While entering some of them in the contest, he discovered there was a category for photos taken outside of the Peninsula.

-- Miriam Boon