My bold - Time is rarely a minor question.
I’m sorry but I’ve not described your work or anyone else’s. I’m reacting to several posters that are suggesting that building each image up from from scratch is a good workflow and something to suggest to new users as superior and more advanced.
Without a starting point that looks very close to finished and the others in the series you’ll struggle to get coherent results. This starting point can be auto applied presets, software defaults or pasted module settings.
If you were to display, sell or share your photographs in a more “serious” setting (perhaps you already are). Would you put those different images next to each other? Depending on your definition of “entirely different character” it might be a great or a terrible idea. But such a series of a heron over different light sounds like an interesting series. Particularly if it remained in place. If done right such a series would be much stronger than the best in the series on it’s own. Unless of course you present a different selection of photos where you only fit one heron in.
If you’ve ever done an exhibition, book or even a considered slideshow you’ll know that the sequence and character of the images is almost more important than any individual image.
edit: I don’t want to make it seem like I’m a proponent of the “find your style and stick to it” idea that you find as photo self help on the web. Nor am I suggesting a series have to have the same look. You can of course to a series of very different images. But exactly what the differences are is important. Something should happen because of the differences.