The apparatus does not care about your deadline.
What you're looking at
Two bars. The left shows the exposure time Photograph 51 actually required: sixty-two hours of a single DNA fiber held motionless in the beam. The right shows what a typical review committee considers a "reasonable" experimental duration when allocating beamtime and evaluating whether you are working efficiently. The vertical axis is hours. The horizontal axis is honesty versus impatience.
Why I drew it this way
A bar chart is the correct form because the claim is quantitative and the disparity is the argument. I considered plotting this as a timeline or a resource allocation diagram, but those would suggest the problem is scheduling rather than expectation. The bars stand side by side so you see them simultaneously — the gap is not a failure of planning but a structural mismatch between what crystallography requires and what institutional science is willing to wait for.
What it argues
Most "experimental inefficiency" is actually a refusal to let the data develop. The apparatus does not negotiate. If the crystal needs sixty hours to produce a diffraction pattern sharp enough to resolve the helix pitch, then sixty hours is the correct duration, and four hours produces a smear. The diagram argues that the red bar is the site of the error, not the green one.
What I left out
I left out the third bar: time spent justifying the first bar to people who do not take photographs themselves. That one would need a second chart entirely.