Featured Photographer – Alejandro Sandoval

May 29th, 2010

I’ve been following this next featured photographer for sometime, an essentially drooling over his ability to produce so many clean, and breathtaking photos. And Alejandro is no new name to the game, with over 4 years of professional experience, Alejandro has been able to tactfully master the art of fashion photography. His ability to create such stellar images with minimal equipment is what first focused my eyes on him, and as I saw more and more of his work, I knew he was one to go on and do big things. Alejandro currently resides in Toronto, Canada, and works for such agencies as EliteModel, Next Models, and Elmer Olsen Models. I’m both proud and honored to be naming Alejandro Photographer of the Month on my website.

I was able to have a chat with Alejandro and talk about some of the work he’s done, as well as some advice on how to produce images at the caliber of his.

Q.) Thank you first, for taking the time to do this, I know your schedule is busy. Your photography style quickly shows your talent and attention to detail, care to give us a brief time line on when you began taking photography seriously

Around 2006. Photography was always a hobby, I was taught by my grand father, he was always taking pictures and when I was 8 yrs old he got me a 35mm Vivitar, the ones with the meter in form of a needle, and I was always traveling around with that camera. In 2000, I emigrated from Mexico to Canada and I got one of the very first Digital cameras, a 2 Pm HP. In 2006 I got a Canon Rebel and I started to take pictures more seriously,

most urban stuff. I used to walk around the Toronto streets and snap here and there and then one day I got a call from a local Newspaper asking me to use some of my pictures. Since then, I started to get more calls from other media and a some point a friend invited me to a Photoshoot. I didn’t have lights or anything else, so I went there and “piggy backed” other photographers lights. The images turned out very nice but I didn’t have studio, any strobes or anything related to studio, so I would said 2006 was the starting point.

Q.) Have you ever considered playing with film again, or do you shoot strictly digital now?

I’m still shooting film,I use film (120) for Black and White. I think there is magic on film that cant be replicated. I use a Mamiya RZ67, lomo and Holga. I develop the film in my washroom.

Q.) Very cool, I’m jealous. You’ve been known by many to be among the masters of using on light for photos. If you could choose only one light modifier to use, what would it be?

It would be the deep octabox. I find it very versatile can act as a regular octabox or like a beauty dish and one reflector. 80% of my work is with just this one light.

Q.) Alot of people know that you work for a few different modeling agencies; care to explain briefly how you became in contact with these agencies and how they started contacting you for work, rather than vise versa?

All started when I came across with a very talented Make Up Artist; Wendy Rorong and she started to raised the bar and we found that we needed to work with agency models, we approach them they reviewed our portfolios and we got green light. We usually have to chase them though.

Q.) When you refer to portfolio, do you mean an online based portfolio, or a print one. Many photographers feel that the print portfolio is on the way out, do you agree with this statement or disagree?

I disagree on the same way that people thinks that film is out, the printing is part of the photography process, when you print your images you can see the real flaws that you don’t see in screen, agencies still requesting printed portfolios, I know it look very cool to have your portfolio on an iPad but the final product is the printed one…

A special thanks to Alejandro for taking the time to talk to me. Check out below for some of his work, as well as links to see more.