Photography: Passion and experience of life

Hi, my name is Francesco Dini, thank you for paying a visit through the pages and above all the photos of my website.

Francesco Dini Fotografo Toscana Italia

My area of expertise is diversified and includes a range of events like ceremonies, weddings, confirmation ceremonies, first communions, baptisms, and birthdays.

I am, furthermore, specialized in portraits: family, babies and children - in the studio, in the outdoors and at home.

I would like to take the opportunity to say a few words about my style for wedding shoots.

The photographs of two people who - on that day, by getting married - mark a fundamental stage in their personal story, require, in my opinion, an absolutely unique interpretation while taking up as little time as possible for that special stroll after the wedding ceremony.

To accomplish this, together with the bride and groom, we choose places that are absolutely perfect in beauty and logistics and where they are invited to stroll, hold hands, chat with each other, not caring at all about my presence, but concentrating only on one another, so that with extreme naturalness their love can explode in the images and in the retelling of their happiness.

 

My history

If you are taking a look at this page it’s fairly probable that you would like to know something more about my personal background and about my photographic journey.
I was born in Florence in 1967 in the cradle of Renaissance.
Who knows if the Beauty and the Arts that surrounded me from the very first days of my life have someway affected me and given life to the impulse of creating and research the innate charm in every single thing.

When I was 14 I started to be seriously interested in photography, I bought my first reflex, a Contax, with 50 mm lens and began my first attempts to fix on photographic paper all the things that caught my eyes.
I read a lot about great photographers of the past, but the most interesting for me was Ansel Adams, that at the end of the 30’s hypothesized and tuned up the Zone System that researched the perfect result in black and white images in the dark room. His wonderful landscape shots intrigued me for the perfection of tonality and framing.
Landscape taking was my first love in photography.

Step by step I put myself to the test, I took the street license, a kind of document that allows you to shoot photos in public places, I spent days and nights in my darkroom trying to apply the concepts assimilated on the books.
I used to print listening to the music, I didn’t pay attention to the time passing, completely immersed into the acrid flavour of the fixing bath, looking for framing, testing new developers and senseless technique that were anyway fundamental part of professional growth .
When I came out from that magic place the sunrise has just passed almost all the times, I used to ask to myself how it could have happened… What was more fascinating than learning a complex process that gives life to an intuition, a precise moment in time? Well in that period of my life absolutely nothing.

   My mum passed away prematurely, and that thing strengthened even more that nocturnal “folly”.

From 1988 to 1994 I was assistant photographer in fashion and still life branch , but in that period it revealed to myself a real passion, portraying people. I was convinced, and now I’m more convinced, that every single person expresses the beauty, naturalness, and spontaneity that make each unique, and above that all, everyone deserves that this kind of beauty is fixed in photographic image forever.

So it started for me the period of reportages: from 1995 to 2007 I went to Indian Reservations in USA, up to Canada’s borders, then to Cuba, Mexico, Morocco, and Egypt. At the same time I handed over the experience done in those travels into photographic services like portraits in studio and outside, but mostly in weddings. As a matter of fact since 1990 I discovered the appeal of ceremony photography, but only after my first reportage in USA definitively exploded the journalistic style that has always dwelled in me.

Since that moment it was clear the idea of going in that direction in my personal travel looking for faces to portray, and thanks to weddings I was almost always surrounded by happiness and joy.

In 1999 in San Casciano in Val di Pesa, where I have been living since 1980 , a wonderful village at the Chianti borders 15 miles from Florence, I decided that was time to turn my passion into something more serious opening a Studio in via Roma.
Since that moment it has been a surge of personal and professional satisfactions, mostly in the branch of ceremonies, not only with Italian customers but also with many English, Irish, German, American, Australian, Spanish, French, Dutch, Swiss, Russian and Japanese people.

I developed, and right now I’m refining, a personal style based on the ability of catching carefree moments, absolutely devoid of built poses unless otherwise required by customers.

In the following years I simultaneously worked in photographic services of locations such as Hotels, Agriturismos and Villas finding in that a continuous discovery of beauty.
I clearly remember a reflection of a friend of mine and teacher of photography that told me that a furnished room has its proper charm and that in some way it’s necessary to pay attention to it with the same attention for the details that make it as unique as a beautiful and mysterious woman.
How true was that!

In 2005 I got married to Valentina , the true love of my life, and in 2008 arrived Maria Chiara, my daughter, a wonderful little girl, and that day I understood what absolute love means.

Now I conduct my activity in a new Photo Studio in via Machiavelli 5 in San Casciano in Val di Pesa, Chiantishire, Tuscany, Italy.
This is natural development of the first one that gave me a lot in terms of growth and that I will always remember with pure love.