Light, Shadow, and Speed… for the #monomad challenge

In a world saturated with color, I chose to strip it away. Not to reject it, but to listen to what it often silences: the texture of emotion, the geometry of a gaze, the weight of a fleeting moment. This black and white series was born from a need to capture the essential, those raw truths that only reveal themselves when light and shadow speak without distraction.

These images were taken at the National Velodrome of Cuba, during the National Track Cycling Championship. They don’t portray the race. They don’t chase the glory. They capture the pre race warm up, that silent interval when the body starts to awaken and the mind struggles to stay calm in the face of the storm that’s about to break.

It’s a moment suspended between calm and explosion. Breathing is still steady, but the heartbeat has already changed. There’s tension, focus, small rituals, and wandering gazes turned inward. That’s where I decided to aim my lens.

I used my Canon 5D Mark III, paired with three lenses that offered different paths to explore the scene:
The Pentacon 29mm f/2.8 allowed me to play with space and the architecture of the velodrome, capturing the vastness of the location and its symbolic weight.
The Prakticar 135mm f/2.8 gave me intimacy. With it, I reached into the human details, the tense muscles, the locked stares, the physical rituals of preparation.
The Canon 70-300mm, versatile and precise, was ideal for freezing fast gestures from a distance, highlighting the contrast between movement and control.

In black and white, cycling becomes something else: a silent dance between steel, flesh, and soul. Gear, uniform, logos, none of that matters here. What remains is the human being facing a challenge. Black and white is not nostalgia, it’s resistance. It’s a filter that removes the noise and exposes what truly matters.

This series does not aim to glorify the athlete, but to humanize them. To show that, before the race, there is a being made of doubt, controlled power, and hope. Light means nothing unless it reveals something true. And in these tense, quiet bodies, I found a truth that deserved to be told.