I learned years ago how important it is to shoot the same subject and location over and over again.
The practice teaches a photographer how to form deeper relationships with the subject, and better understand how the primary subject interacts with secondary elements – like the way high tide may introduce a stunning new reflection, or how a blaze of stars in a dark sky might be the missing element that lifts the image to new heights.
Revisiting a subject also serves as valuable “practice.” You cannot develop your skills in anything without a healthy (or obsessive) amount of practice. It always surprises me to find out aspiring photographers think that they can simply photograph their two-week vacations once or twice a year and come home with compelling imagery! It doesn’t work that way.
Run a single loop measuring 4.16667 miles within a single hour. Now do it again. And again. Now keep doing it – starting a new loop on the hour, regardless of how fast you finish the previous one – until there’s only one runner willing or capable of doing so. Welcome to the simple – some might say sadistic – concept of the Big Dog Backyard Ultra in Bedford County, Tennessee.
Engineers seem to have a clear, if usually implicit, model of the process of design. It is usually an orderly model of an orderly process as the engineer conceives it.
The notion that the design process should be modeled as a systematic step-by-step process seems to have first developed in the German mechanical engineering community.
Herbert Simon independently argues for design as a search process in The Sciences of the Artificial. He was motivated to lay out a strictly rational model of design precisely because such a model was a necessary precursor to automating design. His model remains influential even if today we recognize the "wicked problem" of original design as one of the least promising candidates for AI.
In software engineering, Winston Royce independently introduced a seven-step Waterfall Model to bring order to the process. In fact, Royce introduced his waterfall as a straw man that he then argued against, but many people have cited and followed the straw man rather than his more sophisticated models. Even if ironically, Royce's seven-step model must be considered one of the foundational statements of the Rational Model of Design.