distant train, or peace with the imperfect (2023) (Patreon)

God the minute I took this shot I was so excited. I couldn't believe I'd timed it right. This was two days into a three-day Nissan trip where we actually camped (!) as we pummeled a bunch of end-of-life Frontier Pro 4Xs into the dirt in the Mojave National Preserve. I took a ton of shots that trip, enough to almost get a full photobook's worth of shots out of a press trip, which was pretty exciting.

Then I got home and I checked this shot and it's been on the bubble of acceptable ever since. If you look at it closely—and I mean like 75% or more zoom, I'm sure it looks good in the Patreon email—it's not quite sharp. Despite shooting at 1/125th, I was so low on calories and energy that my hands were shaky, and after I ran into position to get this shot framed right as the train approached, I just couldn't hold it steady. The shot before, with no train, is steady, the shot after (when the train finally wrecked the framing) is steady, this one just isn't. (The full-size download is attached here, as it is with all these daily photos—you can see for yourself.)

So despite the fact that it's definitely one of the coolest photos I got on that trip, no one has actually seen it, because my perfectionism has kept me from ever posting it. The only thing that eventually ended up changing my mind—why you're seeing it today—is that I have shot a lot of film recently (or, a lot of film for me). 35mm isn't actually all that detailed, at least not when you use cheap film stocks like I do; you could probably get more resolution out of the average mid-teens Cybershot handheld. You can't even blow it up to the kind of size to notice minor handshakiness like there is in this shot, which is how I get away with shooting really slow film indoors; cheap color 35mm is incredibly forgiving after shooting high-resolution digital and pixel-peeping every photo for your whole life. 

So I went back and checked this shot like it was film, and I made it my desktop wallpaper, and yeah, it looks fine. Maybe I should shoot less like every frame is a perfect still scene, and just blast off shots again; I've become so intentional with every photo of late, I wonder if I'd do better just taking more photos like I used to. This one seems to be worth it, even though it wasn't ideal. Perhaps there's charm in the imperfect.

Am I still wincing as I hit send on this post? Absolutely.