The beginning.
At the time, I was an art school student in Strasbourg (France). Towards the end of my studies, I had already landed a few jobs as a freelance photographer. I thought that if I could do it while studying, I might be able to do it in the future too, as my main job.
The only problem was that I knew almost nothing about cameras. I wasn’t used to working with them, and if I wanted this to be my future job, I had to find a way to learn how to use them properly. And learning without a real subject is a bit tricky, so I had to find one too.
Most people in this field attended audiovisual schools, but mine was just a “regular” art school, where we did a bit of everything, but nothing too specific, and nothing related to cameras. I wasn’t much of a cycling enthusiast either, but one of my classmates used to come with a quite unusual bike. He told me that this was called a “fixie”. This was my first encounter with fixed gear bikes, and the world of road/urban cycling in general.
Shortly after, I met more people who had similar bikes, I started attending the various events they were doing (like group rides, improvised criteriums on open roads (!), and a few alleycats). They quickly became my friends, and exactly the subject I was missing. Taking pictures of them and their bikes was a very good way to practise photography.
This gave me the opportunity to try out a wide range of techniques and camera settings: whole bikes, close shots on nice components, some portraits, sometimes static things, sometimes moving quite quickly, by day, by night… An aspiring photographer’s dream.
I later shot two Parallax, which were my earliest “photo session” where the only purpose was to shoot bikes.
Of course, I quickly became hooked on these bikes, I had to get one too…
So I built one. It was an old orange Peugeot road bike (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, because
I started having a lot of them and didn't want to keep them all for myself.
So I created this website to share and show them.
Crit’ Sauvages - Strasbourg - 2014-2015.
It was also around this time that I did my very first bike photoshoot, this one with two Cinelli Mash Parallax, where I took the following photo, which is still one of my favorites today.
The story continues ︎︎︎ Chapter 2.
