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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It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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