There’s this quote I think of from time to time by Ansel Adams, which goes “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” To my mind, it’s the perfect summation of the way some photographers put the cart before the horse, so to speak. You could call it proof of how the pursuit of technical perfection can prove kind of fruitless—counterproductive, even.

Just off the top of my head, I can think of a variety of images that encompass this quote one way or another. Have you ever seen technically perfect photographs printed on the worst possible mediums? Just think of journalistic photography. Imagine a photographer spending hours mulling over composition, spending all kinds of time setting people up just perfectly, spending all kinds of time trying to make their portrait subject’s hair as smooth as possible, their makeup perfect, their clothes settling in just the right way. Imagine all the time after the creation of this image wherein the photographer spends even more time in front of the computer, pouring over every pixel...

We photographers hold quite a lot of power when you stop to think about it. That’s what creative control is all about. We have the final say in how an image will look, how it is composed, whether or not to show it to anyone, and so on. And this makes me think about one key thing: As photographers, we dictate how people will consume our content.

Think about the print purchasing process. When we decide that we’re going to sell physical prints, we each have our own system. Maybe we will only sell one print of a given image, or perhaps we will make a limited run on that image. We choose the size and crop for that image, too. So when someone wants to enjoy our work outside of whatever digital advertising we may have done to get it out there, they are now stuck with one option: To purchase the print in the shape and size that we created for them, and then make it fit somewhere within their homes...