This is one of the first images from the time when commercial stock photography was my main concern. At one point I changed my photographic strategy from photographing just because I like it to photographing in order to produce useful images.

This is a dual way of perceiving photography: art and craft, poetry and pragmatism.

These two types of quasi-contrasting ideas generate a tumultuous excitement  for the photographer, that, in the end, leads to the creation of the most interesting images.

The general idea of ​​this photo session was “cycling around the city”. It involved a lot of careful training: finding a special city bike, choosing the perfect place and time in terms of light, outfit and creating a bullet-point photo-shooting scenario. It was kind of casting small movie scenes.

And after all this careful preparation, when we got to the scene and started to work, unforeseen elements

Young woman cycling in an old city square full of pigeons.

appeared….pigeons. They were quite persistent in “defending” their feeding grounds and “territorial. They were not  in the script! What are we going to do? Instead of becoming anxious, we decided  to set aside our detailed scenario for a moment and shoot a few shots taking advantage of the bird’s presence. Actually, they brought an unexpected element of spontaneity that in the end generated one of the most interesting images of the entire series.

A random image that occurred during a well-scheduled shooting, which illustrates very well the dual character, spontaneous and directed, of the current trends in commercial photography, the so-called “authentic images”.

And in closing of this story, I would recall the inspired definition given by Daniel Laflor, a Danish colleague, to modern commercial Stock Photography :

«Stock photography means to capture concepts that others later accept as a visualization of their idea. It’s a mind game. »