Magnum Dopus

What you saw was what you got, but only if you were lucky. This wasn’t point-and-shoot digital photography aided by AI and with a little square to let you know where the faces are.

I remember my dad teaching me how to use a camera—probably a Nikon, just based on memory. I learned how to advance the film, and I learned how to focus the lens on a specific subject. All of this was very manual.

I might have been about ten at the time. It is unlikely that I would have been able to use a camera much earlier, since cameras were very expensive back then.

This thing was heavy in your hand, and taking a picture felt really substantial. You had to be careful not to waste film, so very careful framing before the image was shot was important. Likewise, you would carefully consider the subject and composition well in advance of the editing phase, which was limited to virtually nothing.

My dad may have flattered me when he told me I took a really good picture of the setting Sun (or was it rising?), but I took it to heart and never stopped believing that I had an eye for photo composition.

This might not seem like much of a stretch if you consider that art was my main activity for a few years there, and that I had spent literally every night of my adolescence learning to draw. Still, it was cool to understand that simple framing and subject selection went a long, long way toward making interesting art, and that included photographs.

I never took to photography the way some kids did, though. For me, it was inconceivable to own a $500 camera and all the needed gear; I was mortified when Tim destroyed his Ivan Stewart’s Off-Road Nintendo cartridge he had spent his hard-earned $40 on last month. Cameras weren’t readily available, so a daily practice would have to wait for the digital revolution to occur.

Luckily for me, that took place between adolescence and middle age, so I got to start playing with digital cameras some time in the early 2000s. When I went to the UFC to cover the event in an official (journalistic) capacity, I used one of these new, more affordable toys. I think the price had dropped to around $250 by the time I invested in my own camera.

I got some great photos considering the limitations, but digital photos only became any good around 2010, which just so happened to coincide with my introduction to wiener dogs. Here’s Hallie, my first Dachshund subject, helping me do a little bit of marketing for Revolution BJJ or US Grappling, probably.

I got my first practice taking deliberately goofy dog pics with Hallie:

You can see that cameras on phones were only starting to get good around 2011, when this pic was taken.

I wasn’t sure it would get any better than this absolutely ridiculous pic of Molly taken one day in 2015 while on a road trip:

Alley got a lot of the best pics of Molly, though:

You can sometimes see pics of Molly on the social side of Substack, where I share Notes on a regular basis. It’s almost always #dailydinkles, but every now and then I’ll drop a #monthlymoodles in honor of Molly Moodles, the love of my life for many years.

Of course, Dink-Dink takes the cake. The combination of access to much better devices, me being at home most of the day, and Dinkles being a silly demon in the first place means I end up capturing a lot of pretty goofy pics.

Sorry, that one’s too gooey and not silly enough. Let’s try again:

It is with these blep-tongue pics in mind that I have identified my magnum dopus: the silliest pic I’ve ever taken. It was during the perfect moment during one of those road trips, and the timing isn’t something I could possibly hope to replicate, and it produced one of the most iconic pics of Dink-Dink ever taken:

I couldn’t resist turning my magnum dopus here into the cover for the #dailydinkles book.