Going back to fundamentals gets me closer to the quality I want

By David McElroy · August 19, 2019

When I started photography, I was an ignorant 17-year-old who had just fired a photographer on the school newspaper. I was the editor and I knew I wasn’t getting the photos I wanted, so I picked up a camera — for the first time in my life — and started taking photos myself.

The school paper had a cheap Yashika camera that was fully manual. We had nothing but a 50mm lens. I had nobody to teach me. My early pictures were lousy, but I slowly got better.

By the time I was working at a small daily newspaper as a part-time reporter/photographer during college, I was pretty decent. My new camera was mostly manual by today’s standards. It was a Minolta XG-7 which had a light meter and some primitive program modes, but I had to manually set everything. Focus was manual, of course.

The only lens I had was a normal 50mm lens. But I still managed to get some of the best shots of my life, especially after I discovered I had a talent for shooting basketball games.

Lately, I’ve been pushing myself to return to fundamentals of photography (and of some other art forms).

For the last few weeks, I’ve put away my zoom lens (24-240mm) and shot everything with just a standard 50mm lens. I’ve returned to manual focus. I’m not always going fully manual on exposure, but most of what I’m doing is aperture priority. I’m not using anything fully automatic.

And you know what? It’s liberating. I’m doing better work.

This is a photo I just took of Lucy in the back yard right after I got home from dinner. A camera on automatic mode wouldn’t have gotten this picture, because the camera can’t read my mind.

The camera’s auto-focus would have focused lower on her face. Her eyes would have been just a bit blurry. And if I had accepted the camera’s automatic exposure settings, it would have had a greater depth of field. Do you see the way her eyes are in focus and everything else has a creamy blur? That’s from using a narrow depth of field with an aperture of f/1.8 and manually focusing on her eyes.

Because I’m getting back to fundamentals, I got a photo that made me happier, because it feels like a more intimate connection with Lucy — and it helps to portray the joy that makes me call her the World’s Happiest Dog®.

A photo of a dog’s face — even a beautiful dog such as my Lucy — doesn’t mean that much to most people, but it means something to me. It’s not just about her, though. It’s also about me.

It says that I didn’t take shortcuts. It says I am putting in extra work to get the extra 5 percent of quality that most people will never notice. But it’s that tiny bit extra that separates talented people from those who work hard to really use their talent to its fullest.

There’s nothing remarkable here, but it’s just helping me to remember that in order to be the very best at the things I want to do, I have to return to fundamentals. I can’t take shortcuts. I have to put in the extra work. Sometimes, I have to do things the hard way.

For now, it’s just making my heart happier. In time, doing things the right way might make my work good enough that people are willing to pay for it.

I had gotten into a rut and my photos weren’t getting much better. I was basically doing the same things over and over. Suddenly, I’m getting better. I’m working harder. My work isn’t as good as it ought to be. But it’s better.

Whatever you do and wherever you are in life, maybe the same lesson might apply for you. If you’re in a rut or if you’re not growing anymore, maybe you need to get back to the fundamentals of your life.

Break out of your easy patterns. Do things the hard way. Force yourself to give up tricks you might use as shortcuts.

Everything in life has a set of fundamentals — including how we love and live. Breaking out of your mundane habits just might be what you need. It’s working for me.

And isn’t Lucy a beautiful and loving soul? But I’m biased.

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Something small just made me happy. The specifics don’t matter, but I found myself smiling and I felt a kind of warm joy filling my heart and mind. In that brief moment of ecstasy, I felt the irrational desire to talk with a particular person. It wasn’t a calculated thought or a rational want. It wasn’t even that I wanted to tell the person about this particular thing. I simply felt ecstatic joy — and I somehow connected that feeling to this person. I can’t explain it. If we’re wise, we’ll pay attention to such moments, because the instincts of our hearts and minds often know more truth than our conscious and rational brains do. The same thing can be true in moments of great pain and suffering. If we pay attention to who our hearts are drawn to in such moments — of extreme joy or extreme hurt — we learn something about ourselves. I don’t know why. I only know that our gut instincts sometimes understand deep truths about ourselves that our rational brains haven’t yet figured out.

It started out as a satirical joke, but some friends liked the idea, so now it’s a real Facebook profile picture frame. If you’ve never heard of Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, let me explain. One of the dumber elements of social media is that it allows people to publicly signal their goodness and virtue to others — without actually doing anything of substance. So you see photo frames around profile photos saying things such as, “Moms Against Racism,” as though they’re standing up against those evil moms who are in favor of racism. It’s meaningless virtue-signaling and it deserves to be mocked, so I made a frame and published it on Facebook’s frame system today. If you go to your own Facebook profile picture and add a frame, then search for Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, you can select it. About a dozen of my friends are using it so far. It’s just fun satire — at least until Facebook decides it “goes against our community standards.” Or something. It’s just a fun way of mocking something that deserves to be mocked.

When I first told you about the project that would become DavidMcElroy.TV, I thought it would launch by mid-May. Since today is the last day of May — and I’m still not close to launching a finished product — here’s a brief update. The graphic above is the latest rough mockup of the format, but it’s still subject to change. Even the logo isn’t yet set in stone. Motion graphics are really difficult when you’re starting from scratch. Sunday night, my camera stopped recording, so it has to be sent off for repair. I have an older camera that I’ll keep using for testing, but I can’t launch without the better one. The audio system developed a low buzz this weekend that has me puzzled. I’ll be taking all the equipment over to the home of a local audio engineer who’s volunteered to help me figure out what I’ve done wrong. On top of all that, my on-camera performance seems to get worse with each test I do. There are days when I think I’m crazy to be attempting this. And in truth, I probably am insane to do it, but being crazy has never stopped me before. I’m at least a month away from launch and it could be a few months. Thanks for being patient — and thanks for all the support and enthusiasm for the project that you’ve sent my way.

I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

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