In the last episode of Things I Promised Not to Tell, I asked readers “… if anybody bothers to read this, maybe I’ll expand one of the sections into an upcoming installment…” Well one person did ask, so this post is a response to him; more if you like. As Rodney Dangerfield once said, “I’ve got a million of ’em.”
Today’s Special Post by Joe Farace
While everyone was out playing dodge ball, I was lying on the blacktop waiting for a UFO to take me out of elementary school.—Alex Hirsch
I don’t consider myself to be a fan of conspiracy theories but, for whatever reason, stories, books and well-made documentaries about UFO’s or Sasquatch really grab and hold my attention. What’s that got to do with the real subject of today’s post? Jere goes…
Somewhere around 1994, if my notes are correct, Shutterbug, for whom I’d already written several articles, decided to dip their toes in the digital waters. They did this by creating a “Magazine within a magazine” that they called Shutterbug’s Digital Journal with several pages in the middle of the book that were dedicated to digital photography. They asked me to be part of it and I wrote a monthly column called “The Digital Studio,” which later became the title of one of my first books about digital photography. This section of the magazine even had it’s own “cover” and I contributed photographs for it at least twice.
After a while, a new publisher or somebody in power at the thought digital photography was going nowhere—Kodak’s DCS 100 DSLR cost $25,000 and had 1.4 megapixel resolution— and shut that part of the magazine down. The reason could have been that traditional photo advertisers hated it or the mag’s sales people couldn’t get any of that sweet, sweet advertising money from the computer world, which is funny considering Shutterbug was published by the same people that created the successful Computer Shopper. After the section’s demise, the Managing Editor decided she preferred working with one of the other Digital Journal contributors instead of me and I became persona non grata.
In subsequent years I’d periodically receive an email from the Managing Editor asking for magazine article ideas for the coming year. Each time, I would submit several ideas and then…crickets. I did this for two years and when I received that same email for the third time, I had a brainstorm. Since I never expected to hear from the ME about my suggestions, I created a list, one for each month, of the dumbest article ideas I could think of. I can’t remember all of them but one of the ideas was about platinum printing using the Sun, something I knew nothing about and another was an article about photographing wild turkeys (not the drink.) In my entire life, I’d never seen or photographed one of these birds. The other 10 dumb ideas I submitted are lost in space but might be on one of the hard drives in my stack of old drives in my basement Not surprisingly I never heard from her but THIS is where UFO’s enter the story.
After the Digital Journal was defunct, Shutterbug‘s editor-in-chief and I maintained friendly correspondence through email and more often than not we would chat about UFO’s. He was heavily invested in the subject and had been the photographic consultant for the famous/infamous TV documentary “Alien Autopsy.” Once when we were exchanging emails about UFO’s, he said, “I really miss the articles you used to write for us, they were really good.” I mentioned that I’d submitted article ideas for the past three years but the Managing Editor never replied to me. We had a pleasant talk and no more was said on that topic. But 20 minutes later I received an email from the ME telling me that all of my article ideas had been approved for the coming year.
Thus began the longest writing year of my career because now I had to write all of these goofy stories that I’d proposed. My friend Bill Craig, who had been experimenting with the platinum printing process, helped me with that particular story but the rest of them, I just pulled out of my tuches. During that next year I’m sure more than a few of the magazine’s readers thought I was some kind of Looney Toon but I hope they came to like what I was writing about after that first, strange turkey-filled year.