Forget selfies and sunsets, any ordinary iPhone can be used to take pictures of something far more intriguing: the spirit world.
Julie Rieger is the biggest of Hollywood bigwigs; she’s president, chief data strategist, and head of media at 20th Century Fox, where she’s worked on a few little films like Avatar, Deadpool, The Fault in Our Stars, and more. And in addition to being one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, she’s an avid ghost photographer — in fact, she wrote the book on it.
The Ghost Photographer, out just in time for Halloween from Simon and Schuster, details Rieger’s grief dealing with the loss of friends and family, and the way it unlocked a pathway to the spiritual side for her.
“I lost my mom almost eight years ago, and it was devasting,” Rieger told DT Daily. “And then five months after that, one of our best friends was killed in a car accident. So we were in tremendous grief. And soon thereafter, started meeting people who were psychics and started seeing ghosts in photographs, and started harnessing my own psychic ability, where I can see and hear and feel messages and folks from the other side.”
How does one take ghost pics, you ask? Step one, according to The Ghost Photographer: Get an iPhone. Rieger takes all of her pics with one, having first tried a Samsung camera. “All I got were orbs, little balls of light,” she says. Turn off the HDR function, which “complicates and clutters your ghost photography.” And get an app like PicShop, which she uses to view her pics through various filters.
Some might say it’s a lot to swallow, but Rieger doesn’t bat an eye at the skeptics. She was skeptical herself; after all, as chief data strategist, she’s a numbers person, not an astrologist.
“My universe is ruled by numbers, so of course I was skeptical of all of this,” she said. “When it first started and I first starting seeing ghosts in photographs, I was at peace for the first time. And that was the magic of all of this, the peacefulness it can bring.”
Rieger is the first to admit she’s an atypical Hollywood executive. Not just a woman but also a lesbian, she doesn’t fit the mold. “The puzzle pieces don’t fit! Here I am in a nerd job — not many people have the title of data strategist, and my world has been ruled by numbers for so long. And then, it’s the woo woo! It’s weird! It’s like, so what are you?”
Hollywood has been confronting the problem of it’s Unicron, male-centric world for the last few years, and the #MeToo movement has helped expose the challenges women have known about and dealt with all their lives.
“It’s only being talked about now, it’s been happening forever. It’s happened to me multiple times — never by anybody in Hollywood, by the way. It’s happened to every woman I know,” Rieger told us.
“Being a woman, we face this and we face it our whole lives. We’re the ones who are raised and told to be careful about where you go at night. My mother was like, ‘never go out past 10 o’clock, cause that’s when the crazies are out.’
“She was right, by the way.”
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