PhotoDude.com

Thu. Dec 28, 2006

Five Things You Don't Know About Me

When a professional journalist tags you with a meme that states you should reveal five things previously unknown about yourself, one can’t help but wonder about the motivation. Is he doing some sly research for an upcoming article? Will I soon read in print, “Recently on his own web site, Mr. Stott surprisingly revealed…”??? Nonetheless, such peer pressure is hard to resist. Especially from the guy who invented warblogs (and, oh how I used to love to twist that knife, until he started doing it to himself).

The “29 Miscellaneous Factoids” on the Who Is This Guy page, plus six and a half years of writing here about most everything going on in my head and my life makes this a bit of a brain twister; “have I mentioned that incident/fact before?” Which quickly becomes “is there anything I haven’t told these people?!?”

Well, here’s the best I could do.

[1] When I entered the Portfolio Center in April, 1985, to study advertising photography, I was coming from a career entirely audio in nature (radio). And entering one entirely visual in nature. I struggled with that transition for a bit, and I knew it. But what I didn’t know until about a year later was that my first quarter instructor agonized over what to do with me. He later told me, “I didn’t think you were gonna make it.” Yes, I almost flunked out of photo school.

[2] Every income-producing career I’ve ever had started out as something I did “on the side” for fun. An eight year career in radio started by “being a DJ” for an hour or two a week at “WSHS,” a closed circuit “radio station” that “broadcast” into the Sanderson High School cafeteria during lunch hour. Nearly two decades as a freelance photographer started because I got great seats for concerts when I was working full time in radio, and starting taking pictures of the show for fun. And today the majority of my income comes from web design, which started with a cheesy page about my kitty in 1996, that was allegedly put in place as an online photography portfolio.

[3] I can’t swim. Well, I can swim underwater. Which is also referred to as “sinking.” Since that’s kind of short, as a bonus Two-fer-One … for a significant period of time, I had my wife-to-be convinced I have webbed toes. Simply because I like wearing socks. Almost all of the time. So much so that she finally asked if there was a problem. “Well, sort of. I have webbed toes, and I didn’t want to gross you out.” Once I knew I had her going, I played it out as long as I could, but she finally learned the truth.

[4] I once lived in a trailer. And I mean a single-wide one bedroom piece of crap trailer. It was February of 1978, I’d just moved to Warner Robins, Georgia, to work the graveyard shift at a rock station I’d later program. Quick and cheap accommodations were hard to find, so I took a short term lease on a trailer. It was … interesting. I moved in to find the heat ran off heating oil. And the only truck in town that delivered said heating oil was being rebuilt. For two weeks, two very cold weeks, I wrapped myself in an electric blanket set on “broil.” When you would run the washer and dryer in this trailer, sizable objects would vibrate off the coffee table onto the floor. And one very strange night I came home from work, turned on some lights and the TV, went into the kitchen, and placed some kind of TV dinner in the oven. When it was done, I took it out, turned the oven off … and every electronic device in the trailer went dead. I stood in the dark a second, and on a strange whim, I tried turning the oven back on. The lights and TV came back immediately. It later turned out there was a bad fuse that would only pass electricity if there was enough draw of wattage to make it jump a tiny gap. But that night I just left the oven on until someone qualified in trailer voodoo who could heal it. Three months in that trailer was plenty for me.

[5] I don’t know that I’ve ever told the literal origins of “PhotoDude” here. Sometime back in the early 90’s, I was working as a photographer’s assistant for Carlos Garcia on a logistically intensive shoot for a large company that makes baked goods. There were a lot of people involved, four or five of us on the photo crew, three food stylists, and about half a dozen women from the client company. It was a big shoot for them, so much so they all showed up in custom made t-shirts that read ”[CompanyName] Chicks.” Carlos saw this and muttered, “well, if I’d known I would have gotten us all t-shirts that said ‘Photo Dudes’.” It stuck in my head. Years pass. I sign up for my first Internet account, back in the days when your username could only be eight letters … not enough for my full name. So I chose ‘fotodude’ for my email address. This in turn meant my first web space was at mindspring.com/~fotodude. That’s where Fuji’s Feline Tour and the Olympics both were found in the spring and summer of 1996. By September of that year, after my Olympics experience, I was pretty sure the web was going to be a part of my life for a long time, so I bought a domain: photodude.com.

And another bonus; Jeff Jarvis got tagged with this meme, too, and wrote, “I went to four elementary schools in three states and four high schools in three states — no, he wasn’t in the Army — and impatiently got out of high school and college each in three years, which might help explain why I’m so … well, you fill in that blank.”

Well, I went to three elementary schools in two states, two high schools in two states — no, Dad wasn’t in the military — and impatiently got out of high school in three years, and college in two (except I expect Jeff got two diplomas from that process, and I got zero … that’s right, I ain’t gots no Hi Skool Deeploma).

And all of the above might help explain why I’m so … well, you fill in that blank.

And, no, I’m not going to “tag” five more people to do this list. I don’t generate peer pressure, I only respond to it.