this blog was created to show a different side of images by andre. so you'll see pictures of my family as well as places i have been. you will also see pictures with no
comments as sometime i'll just let an image speak for it's self.
there will be times when i come across a commercial image that i have taken and is out of the ordinary for me, i will post and discuss my thought process behing the image
so hopefully, this blog will help you gain a different perspective about images by andre.
who am i?
I am a just a guy who picked up a camera (around 2005 i think) because I loved to take pictures of buildings as a hobby and as a break from
my day job as a software engineer.
Over a period of time, I started taking pictures of high school seniors and weddings and eventually created images by andre.
I still love to create great software but my #1 passion is creating interesting images of people, places and things!
i think we can all pretty much see where i am headed with doing children photos…meaning i will be doing more and more of them! i have never really been inspired by children photos and that could be the walmart/olan mills/sears effect.
the volume of good kid photos is just not out there…besides the snapshot picture being reclassified as art, so hopefully i will be able to make some contributions thats inspiring or at least have an impact on non-parents. i say non-parents because parents tend to see their child with rose colored glasses on and they immediately proclaim that the photograph is outstanding (i think they are really talking their kids and not the photo)! i have seen this with walmart style photography which we now know its not the standard for artistic beauty.
i am not there yet but i do have a vision in my head about the direction i want to go in and it has to be just right (to activate my creative side) or else i just can’t feel the photo, so bear with me while i fine tune the ‘j kids’ line
As I capture high school senior from time to time, i run into some seniors who honestly believe that they are ugly (of course there are those on the other end of the spectrum!) and I can understand them to a point… If you always compared yourself to a celebrity with their team of makeup artist and hairstylist i would start to think that i am ugly too! that’s why i thought this video was so important as it shows how a celebrity or model gets from point A to point B.
I used to watch America’s Next Top Model and I too was amazed how they would take a person off the street and made them look amazing. These were women that we pass by each and every day at the grocery store, office or football games and they have been made to be super models with just a comb and some paint.
So my advice is to not compare your looks to a celebrities in magazines, movies or videos as they have all been ‘enhanced’ and believe it or not you are just as beautiful*. I put the asterisk there because a person’s personality and attitude has a huge affect on whether you are perceived as being beautiful. So make sure the inside is beautiful first then work on the outside. I know this is hard to do because no one approaches you and says….”you have a great personality” but try try t-r-y to emphasize you inner beauty as it will help enhance your external beauty so much more!
disclaimer: all the portraits on images by andre have been enhanced…too!
It’s not often that I create maternity images as I could never get the right feel for them. Let me explain, all the maternity shots that I have seen never grabbed my attention and inspired me. Most of them usually had some sort of scarf hung over a body and with my love of bricks, metal and concrete…the two style would sort of clash. I suppose under the right circumstances (like if a magazine called me to do a shoot) I could be inspired to create one especially if the shots were wide angle and from a distance, but until then I am sort of feeling my way around maternity shots to see what i like.
Its not often that i capture images of children so when I do I always try to get the parent to communicate with the children to get the most authentic expression. i really find it funny when a friend of my gets into his kids mode as it just looks weird seeing him act like that! but then again i would hate for anyone to see me when i ‘perform’ for my children
june 27, 2008? wow it has been such a long time since i have posted anything on this blog! things have been so hetic in the last year that with trying to maintain our facebook fan pages, twitter account as well as our main website that our blog was sort of left to die.
i started thinking about what value would a blog bring us especially with us having several websites to maintain, and it became clear that the personal side of our business is something that would bring value to our brand. For instance we have had our 3rd (and final!) child this year as well as incorporating some new lighting techniques and style to our portraits. Then there’s my personal project of creating barn images from across our county, state and country. I have even gotten back into my original photography goal of creating images from urban areas around north east ohio.
you will also notice a change in they layout of this blog to accommodate much larger and wider images as i would really like for some of the images to speak for themselves without me blah, blah, blahhing. unfortunately, the older post looks absolutely terrible! so much so that i thought about deleting them all. but, someone may see some value in the older post (something funky happened with some of the characters from shandrea’s post so i may delete those) and seeing how it’s not costing me anything i figured that i would let them stay.
so i hope that you enjoy the new direction our blog is going in!
