Get Ready, Set, Go

I’ve always enjoyed the way a single moment in the street can hold multiple narratives at once. In this frame, taken in Piazza Venezia with the Vittoriano looming behind, the cyclist seems caught between pause and motion — a split-second where the decision to push forward hasn’t yet been made.

The backlighting was a gamble. Shooting into the sun with the Fuji X-T3 and the XF 16-80 meant dealing with inevitable flare, lowered contrast, and the risk of losing detail in the shadows. But I wanted that shaft of light breaking through, almost theatrical in how it picks out the rider against the cobblestones. Exposure was a compromise: holding the highlights in the sky and on the marble of the monument meant allowing the cyclist’s face and clothing to drop into partial shadow.

Compositionally, the cobblestones do a lot of heavy lifting. Their texture pulls the eye in from the bottom edge, the diagonal shadow of the bike acting as a leading line towards the rider. The monument’s symmetry anchors the scene, but the asymmetry of the cyclist’s position adds a necessary tension. I placed her off-centre deliberately — too central and the image would have lost its spontaneity, becoming more of a postcard than a slice of lived Rome.

Technically, there’s a softness in some of the finer architectural details, perhaps due to the slight atmospheric haze and my choice of aperture, which was kept wider to manage shutter speed without pushing ISO unnecessarily. I don’t mind it — it lends the background a touch of separation from the subject without looking like an artificial blur.

It’s a photograph about transition: the quiet before acceleration, the city behind in all its grandeur, and the understated anticipation of that first pedal stroke.