This picture illustrates what I feel is the difference between being a photographer and being an artist.

If this were a photograph, we would be concerned with things like megapixels, sharpness and resolution, tonal accuracy, color accuracy, depth of field, and all sorts of things that represent the photographer's eternal search for perfection. We would be blasted with an incredible amount of information, in parallel, like a high-bandwidth connection. Anything less than a perfect rendition will be seen as a photographic failure.

But an artist has a different viewpoint. A picture can be as full detail as a painting by Bosch, or as simple as the picture above. Here, the image is reduced to a visual shorthand. But, somehow, you don't feel cheated.

Henri Cartier-Bresson talked about the "Decisive Moment," implying that there was one optimum viewpoint, and one optimum moment in time that defines the perfect rendering of a scene and, for a photographer, this can be true.

But, as an artist, I think about the "Decisive Image." This final rendering can occur a long time after the image is begun. The image above traveled through numerous incarnations over perhaps six years to reach its current state.

Is this the end of the line, the final state for this image? Probably not.

Stay tuned.