How I became a photographer
May 30, 2017I was 10 years old and we were walking in a park with my mother and my sister, when I found an abandoned point-and-shoot film camera under a bench.
My mother brought it to the police station, but they told her to keep it until the owner would claim it, which, as they suggested, never happened.
That is how I got my first camera.
A few years later, I was exploring the cellar at my parent’s house, when I found my second camera: an old SLR camera that belonged to my father. I immediately borrowed it, for more than 25 years now.
I really began shooting intensively in my twenties, as I caught the travel bug and after a friend of mine taught me how to use that camera. Before that, I didn’t even know what focus and exposure control meant.
In 2001 I studied Economic Sciences in Lisbon, with plenty of time to discover the city and to shoot. That same year, I visited Corsica and I took what is still one of my favorite pictures.
Back in my business school in Lille, I enrolled into the photography association and I discovered that photography was a great way to get to know people.
In 2003, I went for another exchange program, in Mexico. I had in my luggage my old Olympus film camera and my first digital camera: it was the size of a credit card and it was always with me. I was studying business administration but I also took a few hours of photography classes. And of course, I traveled a lot.
Fast forward in 2013: after working for 6 years in a digital marketing & advertising agency, I stepped into the entrepreneurial world to launch an e-commerce website. Among other things, we wanted to help carefully curated fashion brands to sell their products thanks to
good pictures with influencers.
As I was in London, I accidentally bumped into the exit of a fashion show. My camera with me, I started shooting the stylish people I saw. That was my start into street style photography, before knowing that it was a world in itself.
The e-commerce website lived for 2 months only, but the 2 years we spent developing it helped me to improve my skills. I was shooting a lot to produce content for our social networks, as a pre-launch communication strategy.
I was spending time with brands and influencers to pitch our project, and that is how they started to notice me as a photographer.
Quickly, we realized that our true potential was as a digital communication & brand content agency, with me as one of the photographers, and that’s how I became one.
N.B: After our e-commerce website experience and as part of our brand content agency, we developed another website, called 24hstory.com.