After Mississippi votes in their primary tomorrow, we officially become the new Iowa - or is it the new old-New Hampshire - with no other voters competing for the candidate's attention.
We have been hearing the predictions for weeks now, about how Pennsylvania would be the site of the "decisive battle in the Democratic campaign." But it wasn't until Hillary Clinton emerged last week with victories in Texas and Ohio - that we do indeed get at least six more weeks of campaigning (is that kind of like Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow?)
I figure I shot the first photos of the very beginning of this historic election, the first time in a generation that Pennsylvania has played a significant role in a presidential primary. 
I went out late Tuesday night to a Clinton results watch party at Finnegan's Wake where I photographed supporters listening to her Ohio victory speech.
After years of seeing Pennsylvanians barely turn out to vote in a presidential primary that doesn't matter, the next month or so promises to be exciting. It has always amazed me to see how seriously the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire take their role in our election process. When you talk to people at campaign events, in diners, pizza shops and bowling alleys across those states and see how informed they are - months before they even cast their ballot or caucus - you can't help but feel good about the process.
That's one of the best thing about covering politics. Seeing good citizenship in action. Meeting voters who make the effort. 
I received an email from a reader who saw my Iowa caucus photos and said, "I have no way of knowing if this caucus is typical of others around the state, but I had a good feeling after watching your slide show of these people helping to pick the president. They seemed like solid citizens to me."
Voters often complain that "the media" only covers the horse race aspect of the election.
Newspapers do offer an abundance of information, background, and comparisons of platforms and positions. I have always considered it the job of photojournalists in a political campaign to draw reader's attention to those stories. We could just simply supply serial speaking photos and maybe no one would care. But - and this is why I enjoy politics so much - by making pictures that really catch the readers eye - whether on the newsprint or on the web - we can force them to pause long enough to take a second glance and maybe even read a story they might otherwise overlook.
I just parachute into a campaign every once in a while, but I'm always impressed at how wire service photographers - from AP, Reuters, AFP and Getty generate an amazing variety of images every single day - for months.
Also fun to look at, in the year leading up to the Iowa Caucuses, a group of free-lance photographers based there set up a daily campaign photo website - The Stumping Grounds - "A Daily Photo Blog of Political Proportions." Click on the Joshua Lott photo at left, to see what they did when the spotlight was on their state.
One of my favorite political photographers, New York Times staffer Stephen Crowley, who works out of the paper's Washington bureau, has been covering presidential election campaigns for years. That means a lot of time spent on a bus. So as just one way to express some of his visual creativity, he has turned all those hours "staring out the window, grasping for a morsel of humanity" into a collection of photos.
First, four years ago traveling with Senator John Kerry, Crowley photographed "some of the faces and places that (Kerry) saw over the last two months if he happened to look out the window as his campaign motorcade rolled by."
Most recently, this time on the bus with Senator John McCain, he produced a slide show of diptychs - "Images of the country's character and culture as hinted by billboards, shifting light patterns and happenstance." Click here for that project, titled "Out the Window, Three Days Across America," and on his photo above of the mannequins (and Kerry's bus) in a Wheeling, W.Va. store window for the 2004 version.
The weekly news magazine photographers must try even harder to make images that will not seem stale when viewed days after readers have already seen pictures of most of the previous week's events.
David Burnett, a world class photojournalist who started freelancing for the original Life magazine before it folded - and has the cover of THIS week's Time magazine - is still finding fresh ways to share his views from the campaign trail.
Besides the digital SLR's photojournalists all carry, he also uses all kinds of other cameras, including a 1950's Speed Graphic - that's a 4x5 FILM camera - with a WWII-era Kodak aerial reconnaissance lens, to make selective focus images like this one of McCain shot last week. He also writes about photography, and politics, in the blog (We're Just Sayin) he shares with his wife Iris, a writer and author who has worked for eight presidential campaigns and served as an adviser to two presidents.
I am heading up to Scranton now, where Hillary Clinton will campaign this evening, so for pictures during this primary, and on through the conventions and November, keep coming back here. And don't forget, Pennsylvanians can't vote in the April 22nd primary if you're not registered - the deadline is March 24th.
