How much time should you spend on an image?

There seems to be a broad range of photographer tolerance for time spent editing an image. It doesn’t seem to come up nearly as much on the web, but I imagine that there is a similar range of opinions about how much time should be spent travelling, planning, lighting, setting up, and capturing the image in the first place. I think that image quantity and image intent is a largely unspoken but key aspects of people’s attitudes towards this subject. When I’m making art, my most extravagant objective is to get a dozen deeply satisfying images a year. To be honest, most years that doesn’t happen, and I don’t feel bad about that. Maybe my threshold for success is one or two such images a year. For those kinds of images, I don’t mind spending days setting up a shot and days fiddling with the editing. I almost said perfecting instead of fiddling with, but no image of mine is ever perfect, and sometimes I just have to tell myself that it’s as good as it’s going to get today and maybe hit it…