Decision making is something I do all day.  In fact, I get paid for it.  I’m not claiming the decisions I make are important or life changing or even interesting.  I’m only claiming that I make decisions.  And I do it all day long.

The thing is, I’m pretty quick at deciding.  In fact, I’ve spent a couple of decades learning how to slow down and not jump to conclusions.  I don’t need to know every possible piece of information; only a reasonable amount to feel confident that I can make a choice between options.

So, I ask, why is it that once I put my work away, I can’t seem to make even the simplest decision?

Is decision making a non-renewable resource?  Do you only have so many decisions you’re allowed to make during the day and then all decision-making brain cells are drained until they are recharged over night?

I don’t know why, but deciding things like “what do I feel like eating?” often feels like I’m trying to decide whether to wage war on a neighboring country.

Similarly, tonight as I looked through the remaining shots from Signal Point trying to decide which ones to include in today’s post, I look at the first shot and think it’s not bad.  Buth then I look at the second shot and prefer the framing.  In the first example, the bank of clouds is entirely visible.  There is no view of Venus in either shot, but the temptation to keep both images overwhelms.  Instead of choosing the one I like the best, I now have doubled the storage required.

Oh, and wait, what about the vertical version?  Or the wider angle view of the valley at 18mm?  Or what about the slightly less wide angle view at 28mm?

I know that there should ultimately be only one best image but whose best am I shooting for?

Then, there’s the HDR processed images.  After all, given that i went through near heart failure to get multiple exposures of several images, shouldn’t I keep the processed versions of these negatives, combining the many exposures and trying to output a combined photo that exposes all parts at the same time.  I’m pretty sure the entire collection of exposures should be kept just in case I want to recombine them all differently in the future.

I would also share the in-camera HDR settings, but I haven’t actually figured out how to do that yet.  Figuring out how to do brackets of 7 exposures was challenging enough and then that failed.  It makes it a little difficult to get motivated to figure out how to use the more advanced features like in-camera multi-exposure processing.

Maybe next post . . .