Hi Rick,
I'm still new with K2 myself, but here are a few ways I've been aligning an item image.
1. Use my external CSS styling to style the DIV class that wraps the image.
2. Create a separate template (e.g. my own template of Item.php, Category, CategoryItem, etc) and hard-code some placement in the template. Then, in the K2 category, I select this modified template.
Maybe this would spur some thought on your end.
-- Adam