The beginning. How ‘CYYYCLES’ came to life.

Everything started in 2014.

At the time, I was an art school student in Strasbourg (France). As a student, I had already landed a few jobs to create loops for a few brands.

I thought that if I was able do it while studying, I could also do it in the future, as a job. The only problem was that I didn’t really know anything about cameras or photography in general.

If I wanted this to be my job, I had to learn a few things about that. And in order to do this, I had to find a subject.

I wasn’t much of a cycling enthusiast at the time, but one of my classmates used to come to school with a quite unusual bike. He told me that it was called a “fixie”. This was my first encounter with such bikes, and the world of road/urban cycling in general.

One evening, I attended a ‘group ride’ around the city, with several people joining in every Wednesday, all year round, in Strasbourg (named Mercre’ride Strasbourg). I started attending more of those rides, along with some events they were doing (like improvised criteriums on open roads (!), and some alleycats).

Those people quickly became my friends, and exactly the subject I was missing to train photography. Shooting them and their bikes was a very good way to practise that.

This gave me the opportunity to try out a wide range of techniques and camera settings: whole bikes, close shots on components, portraits, static things, sometimes moving quite quickly, by day, by night… An aspiring photographer’s dream.

The few pictures you will find below are the very first ‘cycling photos’ I ever took, during my very first ride with them. I later shot two Parallax, which was my first photo session where the only purpose was to shoot nice bikes.

Of course, I quickly became hooked on these bikes, I had to get one too… I had to own one too, so I built one.

It was an old orange Peugeot road bike (visible here) converted to fixed gear. A year later, I bought my first proper track frame and built myself a second bike (this 8bar). And so on. I’m sure you know how it goes...

See all of the bikes that I have owned since that time here.

After a while, I realised that I’d like to find a way to share all these photos. . I started to have a lot of them, and didn't want to keep them all for myself. So I created this website to share and show them.

My very first ‘cycling photos’ ︎ - 2014