About Eric Ilasenko Photography...

With over 45 years experience as a full time professional photographer, and a family background in the dance industry, Eric Ilasenko Photo strives to make picture day a fun, stress free, and rewarding time for everyone involved including the dancers, parents, teachers, studio staff, and the studio owner, while producing excellent portrait photographs that people will treasure for a lifetime...
Photographer Eric Ilasenko has had an intimate association with the art of dance since he was first born...

Eric's parents were both pro dancers (one a teacher and performer, the other a competitive dancer) who met and fell in love around a dance floor. Although they stopped competing and teaching, they never stopped dancing and both continued to dance actively socially and also performed in exhibitions and shows on occasion. Later, they ran a successful mail order dance boutique which was a family business where young Eric would be traveling the Midwest and East Coast almost every weekend to major dance workshops, helping his parents who were vendors selling their wares.

As a budding shutterbug, Eric soon turned his camera lens to an obvious subject near and dear to his heart,  the dancers performing in the big evening shows that followed the dance workshops. He began selling prints to these dancers with great success. Soon, his flattering and artistic dance action photography became a favorite among performing dancers who would anxiously line up at his parents Dance Boutique display tables to view past albums of onstage performances and place orders for prints of themselves. In all, Eric photographed over 5,000 images of dance performances over a 5 year period.

His first magazine photo was published in a dance publication when he was only 13 years old, and he continued to photograph dancers as often as possible as he got older despite his photographic career taking him in many new directions. At 14, he landed his first job as a photographer for a Detroit area portrait photo studio. By 15, he was a regular contributing photographer to a major metropolitan weekly newspaper with a circulation of over 50,000 readers, where he regularly produced full page feature stories on a wide variety of subjects including concerts and events. He was the youngest officially NASA accredited member of the working press who covered the very first launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia, where he hitchhiked with other photographers from the main security gate to the secure press area because he did not even have a drivers license yet!

After graduation, he took a job with a major department store photography company where he drove over 50,000 miles in one year doing portraits of babies, children and families in stores all over Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. On weekends home, he was  also a freelance "stringer" for a national portrait/yearbook company and covered high school sports, events, and dances for them.

Eric also began doing a lot of other magazine freelance assignment photography, and eventually ended up doing work for publications around the world which was distributed by the international stock photo news agency Gamma-Liaison for nearly a decade.

He worked in the photo department at a major utility company for several years where he was exposed to lots of interesting corporate and industrial photography, publicity, public relations, executive portrait, and helicopter aerial assignments. He still loves to hang out of choppers to this day!

When he moved to Florida in 1990, he worked in the school picture business as senior photographer with one of the leading school photo companies at the time and traveled to schools from Flagler to Manatee counties daily, shooting as many as 400 underclass kids each working weekday, and on weekends he would also shoot Proms, Dances, Dance Schools, or Sports.

After moving to Florida, he also got his first pet parrot, and his photo career was never the same as Eric soon began photographing for pet magazines, calendars, and book publishers. Today, he supplies major publishers worldwide with animal images that are seen in print regularly. He also developed a line of products that feature his pet photography including computer screen savers, mousepads, mugs and more that he markets to pet lovers in stores and online.

In the late 90's, Eric operated a retail and commercial photo studio in Longwood, Florida, near Orlando, until he closed it after moving to the Daytona Beach area where he and his wife Martha now reside in Ormond Beach. Now photographing on location exclusively, his photography services are available on location for a wide variety of assignments and clients in the Central Florida area including Dance Studios, Schools, Portraits, Commercial, and Events.

Eric has continued to always photograph a few select dance studios each and every year, as it keeps him connected with the roots of his photography career, and he greatly enjoys the creative challenge as well as the fun of interacting with enthusiastic dancers and teachers who share a common love of the art of dance and performing.

In Summer 2024, his business was closed as he tries to find a kidney.
If you are looking for a highly qualified, experienced professional photographer that can be counted on to reliably produce and deliver artistic images your students and parents will consistently love.
Martha & Eric have been married since 1998
and they love photographing together!
Eric's parents, Curtis and Kim (Kimena) performing together in the 80's

Kimena (Mom) dancing at an ethnic festival in downtown Detroit, 1982.

Covering first Space Shuttle launches as a teen.
ABOUT THOSE ARTSY BLACK & WHITES...
In addition to working as a photographer, Eric also spent a lot of time in darkrooms, mostly as a Custom Black & White Printer at several major commercial pro labs that served the demanding commercial photography market. He developed a deep love of the brown tones or sepia, especially in historical 75+ year old images he helped to preserve and print. He loved fine art custom hand printing on fibre based silver-halide photo papers, and used a variety of (really stinky & icky!) toners to capture a rich sepia tone. Since going digital, he has crafted and refined special  techniques to give a custom sepia look to images, something he really likes to do with some dance images that have timeless appeal.