Ignacio Gonzalez: Photographing Cyclists With Kodak T-Max

All images by . Used with .

More and more, the idea of photographing lifestyle imagery with film is becoming popular. Heck, even disposable cameras are moving more into the fore. It’s a slap in the face to the very highly curated and almost perfect imagery that’s often put across on Instagram and other platforms these days. So when Ignacio Gonzalez decided to photography cyclers in Spain with a Voigtlander Bessa R2 and Kodak T-Max, one can easily imagine all the potential for great photos.

Bikes in and of themselves involve lots of geometry, which lends itself to the nature of how Kodak T-Max works with tones at both ends of the histogram. But then you combine it with people, architecture that a city offers, routes, etc and what you end up having is a series of photos that are absolutely begging to be printed.

Part of what makes these photos so special is the lighting. These images have very soft lighting due to the cloudy coverage. In fact, there are pretty much no shadows. And so to that end, Ignacio is more or less simply relying on tones in the scene to create and capture better scenes. Then in the development phase, he most likely worked with the film in a way to bring more contrast out of it. His embrace of the quickly moving scenes, blur, and the sharpness of details all within one subject help to really illustrate cycling life in Northern Spain.