RANDOM SHOTS FROM A BULLET TRAIN

By MICHAEL PERKINS

MANY OF MY PHOTOGRAPHER FRIENDS NOW SHARE STORIES WITH ME, not about the great shots they bagged or the selling points of this or that bit of kit, but of the physical costs of staying in the game. Now, of course, I should mention that most of these friends are also, like myself, getting pretty long in the tooth, and that the rigors of making images have become more pronounced with every new day. Cameras, no matter how compact or streamlined, still have to be lugged from one place to another, and since the shooting experience is crammed with variables, from topography to weather to one’s own mortal carapace, said lugging can exact a toll as time progresses. Many of my birding friends, for example, frequently suffer a muscular crunch known as “birder’s neck”, induced by too many skyward searches for titmice and flycatchers. Others get it in the shoulders because the only lens for a certain job is also the most likely to louse up one’s upper arm. And so forth.

Cambria, California, September 6, 2025, 180mm, f/6.3, ISO 100, 1/640 sec.

It’s impossible to age without eventually fixating on how much the process seems to be speeding up, or, in photographic terms, how many shots we’re likely to be around to take. We are, suddenly, one backache, one misplaced step, or one out-of-warranty ailment from obsolescence, inducing the feeling that even our most considered frames are random shots from a bullet train. It’s as if dusk is approaching and we’re trying to squeeze in just one more somersault on the summer lawn before our dad calls us home. It thus becomes tricky to remain calm, to remind ourselves that, even were we to top the century mark, we could never see or shoot it all. We have to learn to be okay with limits. Because, simply, we have no choice.

And so we learn how to choose….our place, our time, our approach, our moments of abandon, our rhythm of patience. We become photo editors of the soul, posing the everlasting questions, what can be done? With these conditions? With this stretch of time? With how I feel right now? This is not despair, merely a recognition of the tools and time we have. It’s really the same calculation that all photographers have always had to make, except that time (or its imminent disappearance) has now rendered the choice more urgent. I keep hearing Adam West’s Batman rousing his partner to the chase with “QUICKLY, ROBIN! THERE’S NOT A MOMENT TO LOSE!” in that stentorian call to arms that was his melodramatic specialty. And so it is with the making of pictures. There is still time to play, along with more carefully adjusted and efficient ways to do it. The bullet train races on, but not everything out the window need be a blur.