I have, by conservative estimate, about a dozen pictures on my phone that look exactly like this one. Same table, same harvest, same dog, same increasingly unbothered expression on Farmer Jack's face as I ask him — again — to just sit there and look photogenic next to the tomatoes for one more second. It's basically a flipbook of a small dog's will to live slowly draining out of his body, one tomato at a time.
Here's how this actually goes, every single time, without fail: I set the harvest out, arrange it nicely, decide it needs a subject, and pick up Farmer Jack like he's a garnish. He gets placed on the table with the enthusiasm of a cat being introduced to a bath. I take one photo. It's fine. Just fine. So naturally I adjust the tomatoes two inches to the left, pick him back up, put him back down in the exact same spot, and try again. Repeat this process approximately nine to eleven more times. This is, apparently, how content gets made.
At no point during this entire process did Farmer Jack care how he looked, whether the lighting was good, or whether this was going into "content." He sat because I put him there, tolerated it because that's apparently the terms of his employment, and made it extremely clear through his face alone — and only his face, because he refused to give me anything else — that his patience had a limit and we blew past it somewhere around photo four.
For the record: the harvest itself was genuinely great. Tomatoes everywhere, the last of the zucchini, a couple of sunflower heads that had gone to seed, all of it arranged beautifully on the table for exactly the amount of time it took Farmer Jack to decide he'd had enough and this was, in fact, beneath him.
Farmer Jack would like it on the record that being repeatedly picked up, relocated two inches, and set back down against his will does not count as a good day in his professional opinion, and he will be filing a formal complaint with HR, if HR could please identify itself and also explain why it took this long to respond to his previous eleven complaints, all of which were also about this.
I regret nothing. The photos are incredible. He'll get over it. He always does, right up until the next harvest, when we do this entire thing again.