Cycling Slow is what I do Best

What happens when you want to share your obsessions? Passion yes! But more like obsessive hobbies that are bikes, film photography, and travel entered my life and decided to never leave. Film photography has been a near-constant presence in my life thanks to my grandpa, who taught me almost everything there is to know about photography, composition, film processing, developing, and printing. And one thing that has always filled me with joy is sharing my results and my improvements. Social media platforms were the logical places to go, but were not satisfying outlets for me. Printing is great but expensive, and keeping my scans on a hard drive so they can eventually end up as wallpaper is just sad. So I started a blog! Sharing pictures along with a bit of writing is something I absolutely love. And, it gives me an excuse to travel while capturing people and their bikes on film.

I shoot most of the time with my Nikon F100. Auto-Focus, auto-aperture, auto-everything basically. Truly the easy solution while shooting on and off the bike. I’ve also used a Konica Recorder half-frame for big events so I could afford to shoot way more.

Recently, I’ve been looking for something lighter and more portable, which has resulted in me slowly making my way back to the world of rangefinder cameras.

Even though my main focus is fixed-gear cycling, which is very urban, I have taken my bike to deserts in the middle of Spain and between Japanese mountains – always carrying a camera to document my trip. You might know cycling as a highly competitive sport where people wear very tight jerseys. Nothing against that… but the type of cycling I love is at the opposite end of the bike culture spectrum. To me, cycling is letting my wheels spin slowly, traveling to make new friends, and asking people about their visions.

I’ve included some pictures in this article. London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, San Francisco… There is a little bit of everything. But one of my favorite shots of 2023 ended up being this black-and-white blurry picture that I took on a foggy day on our way to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Cycling can be shown as a very static thing like the picture of my bike in the middle of Bardenas Reales, or my friend’s racing cross bike that we decided to photograph in a river. I mean why not… But as soon as you add a bit of blur, you can feel the motion and how lively and freeing cycling really is. When it’s outside it isn’t a problem. But when it comes to covering inside races like last year in Berlin, it can prove a bit challenging on film. Especially when you forget your flash at home…

If this piques your curiosity, you can see everything I do on www.slowspinsociety.com, where I post two to three times a month. And since I can’t get enough of cycling and photography, I might slowly post articles that purely touch on the “Camera” side of this project.

See you over there!

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