About me
I was born in Madrid in 1976. At the age of six my grandfather gave me my first photo camera, and since then I started watching life through a viewfinder. At school, I already knew I wanted to become a photographer. I read assiduously photography magazines and books. Fate decided what my first job would be: a photography magazine, Revista Foto (Photo Magazine). My main task was to file lots of stills in the archive of the editorial staff. There were unforgettable beginnings, where I was lucky enough to work with pictures of the best photographers around the world: Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, Alberto Schommer, Annie Leibobitz… I just had to sort them alphabetically. As there were many pictures to classify -and I couldn’t settle them as mere pieces of paper- I used to come every day one hour earlier to contemplate, taste and enjoy them.
One day I came across a book about Spanish Directors of Photography. I had to write a 10 line review for a new section. It was my first assignment as editor, so I took the book with great enthusiasm. At the very first pages, I realized that it was joining my passion for photography and filmmaking: the figure of the Director of Photography. If only one frame was exciting, 24 frames per second blew me away.
At the age of 18, I started my Degree in Communication. At the same time, I combined the degree with several jobs at the film&tv industry. Simultaneously I was shooting shortfilms as DoP, and joining as many film workshops as I could. Undoubtedly, one of the most intense moments became when I went to The Film Maine Workshops, in the US. It was the first time I was shooting with film stock -16mm- with great DoPs from the ASC as professors.
Some time later by chance, while I was at the lab screening the answer print of a shortfilm, they asked me if I would like to sign for a vacancy in the color grading department. I had worked as a DoP at the labs, but never before I had graded a film. This was a wonderful opportunity for learning all the post process, so important for cinematographers. I couldn’t refuse the offer. I started grading short films, and a few months later I moved up to features. I shifted to other Spanish labs and I started to grade in digital, for DI. At the same time, I was using my holidays to shoot more short films as cinematographer, with the dream of shooting a feature someday.
Finally, in 2010, that opportunity came to me with Ways to Live Forever, a film that won more than 15 national and international awards and was nominated for several categories at the CEC Awards of the Spanish Film Writers Circle, including Best Cinematography.
Since then, over the years, I have been fortunate to work with extraordinary directors and crews on projects that have taken me from Madrid to New York, from Galicia to Buenos Aires—allowing me to grow through independent productions and to enjoy working on major projects for platforms such as Netflix, Disney, Movistar, and Paramount+.
Every shoot is a world of its own, yet in all of them I look for the same thing: for the image to serve the story. Because if those mornings spent studying photographs by Cartier-Bresson or Capa taught me anything, it is that cinematography is, above all, a craft. One that is learned by looking, by making mistakes, and by looking again. And I am still looking.