I think the process of creating photos is a lot like the
process of creating distilled liquor.
Not that photography necessarily needs an analogy, but sometimes when
I’m deep into the minutia, it helps me get some perspective.
Behind every bottle of, say, rum sitting there on a store
shelf is a long, long road with many steps. Land is cleared for sugar cane. Time and care is taken to then grow the cane. Backbreaking labor (for very low wages)
harvests the cane, to have the juice squeezed out, which is then heated and the
alcohol captured, bottled, transported and sold.
I’m sure I missed some steps and oversimplified, but the
point is, that that bottle on the shelf exhibits only a very small portion of all
the physical and mental elements that went into its making.
And the photography process has a lot of these same
elements. It has the labor
of moving gear around. It has the
mental effort of thinking about it all, and the physical elements of all the
gear itself. And most analogously,
it produces many photos that must be distilled down to a concentrated, select
few.
When the end consumer sees that bottle on the shelf or that
photo in an ad, they mostly have no idea about all this, and don’t particularly
care to. They might be
interested in the overall brand story (no GMO, no Photoshop, etc), but that’s
an independent factor being brought into the mix for other reasons.
They care about the final product, and how much they like
it, not the details of how it got to be what it is. You have to care though, because it’s your care that they’re
tasting.
So although it may get tiring, and at times seem futile, to
be endlessly debating things like whether to go with image A or image B, that’s
part of the process. It all
is. Producing great photos
requires planting and growing and harvesting and then, finally, distillation
down to the essence. The
quality of the final, distilled product depends on the quality of the work that
went on all along the way.