A photograph is already a measurement. The moment you decide where the frame ends, you have made a claim about what counts and what does not — which is the same decision a data analyst makes when they choose a column to keep and a column to drop. I have spent a long time pretending these were two different jobs. They are not.
On assignment I shoot the way I clean a dataset: slowly, suspicious of the obvious, looking for the reading that survives a second pass. The best frames are rarely the dramatic ones. They are the ones that still hold up when you come back the next morning, coffee in hand, asking whether they actually say what you remember them saying.
Every frame is a hypothesis about what matters. Most of them are wrong, and that is the point.
What I am after, in stills and in spreadsheets alike, is the difference between a number that decorates an argument and a number that carries it. A good editorial image carries. It does not need a caption to lean on. When I teach this, I tell people to remove the caption and see if the picture still argues. Usually it goes quiet. Occasionally it keeps talking, and that one you keep.
So I treat the two crafts as one discipline with two outputs. Read the light, read the data, and refuse to publish the version that flatters you more than it informs the reader.