Aldo Emmanuel

Aldo Emmanuel was born in Mexico and reared in Dallas Texas. Aldo is a photographer that loves to create unique art that captures the moment. He loves to read and draw.

AMPS: As a young child what did you want to be when you grew up?

Aldo: I’ve always wanted to be an actor. In general, I’ve always loved art and I love drawing and acting. I think it’s cool to play different characters and I’m actually still working towards that. What I’m doing now is to help me facilitate it so that I can understand the industry better.

AMPS: How old were you when you got interested in becoming a photographer and what or who motivated you?

Aldo: Actually at the age of twenty-eight (laughing) is the first time that I picked up a camera. I have a friend named Mandy Red and when she first started modeling she asked me to come with her because she didn’t really know the photographer and it was for safety reasons. When we got to the location where they were doing the photo shoot and I saw how he was being creative with the camera I thought it was pretty cool. It was like art to me and I like drawing so it was like they were creating each panel when they were taking pictures. It just started growing more and more on me and I said to myself I think I can do that. So we would do photo shoots with Texas LowRider Magazine because Manny did shoots with them a lot. One day we were on a shoot and the guy that ran it, Joe Arenas, asked me if I wanted to use one of his cameras so I said sure, and so of course, all the pictures that I took sucked. It was pretty cool but it was only cool to me because it was digital and it was like an instant gratification kind of thing because after you took the picture, you could look at it instantly. So I went and bought myself a starter camera and I thought I was the man (laughing) with the camera, and that’s how I got started.

AMPS: How did one of your photos end up in the Galleria Mall in Dallas, and how does that make you feel knowing thousands of people are seeing your work?

Aldo: There’s this car dealership here in Dallas that sells high end cars and performance cars. Cars like Lamborghini, Camaro SS, Porsche, supercharged cars, etc. Going back to what I was saying earlier, building images that are more like a work of art. I started getting into light painting because I wanted to open up a part of my business doing that. More like martial arts work and one day I walked into the dealership and I had a couple of examples of my projects that I had done and the owner really liked them. The owner wanted to know if I could do something like that for him? We sat down in his office and talked and he wanted something that he could advertise with because it was a very nice type of thing. We sat down and came up with the image that he used for the advertisement. A couple of us went out and created a scene, and the way we shot it wasn’t a picture that you just set up and snapped. I had to flash each individual car separately, take a picture of the building, and then bring it all together. I had to go through an editing process to create the image. He bought two huge metal prints. I like printing on metal because when you print on paper it’s really cool, but when you’re printing something like a car on metal it just makes it pop. The Galleria has a lot of high end stores and a lot of traffic always going through there, so he decided to put the picture by the Apple store. It makes me proud knowing that I took the time to learn how to do that kind of work. It didn’t happen just by taking pictures. I had to put in time, effort, and money. It wasn’t even about other people, it was about me seeing it and knowing that I created that.

Book Aldo: http://aldoemmanuel.com/

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