Franco Banfi was born in Switzerland in 1958. He first started diving in the lake near his home in 1981. Two years later, driven by a desire to travel and explore, he went to the Maldives where he took his first underwater photographs. In the following years he continued diving in the lakes and rivers close to his home before venturing to the Mediterranean and tropical seas and deepened his qualification to become an underwater instructor.
In 1996 he has published a book of images and a dive guide about Papua New Guinea, edited by White Star Vercelli. Banfi's work has appeared on several magazines and in the last years he dedicate his attention to unusual places, out from the common destination, like Antarctica, Arctic, the White Sea and the Aldabra atoll. He prefers to dedicate himself to faraway destinations and/or with difficult environmental conditions, to contribute to widen one's knowledge of the sixth continent has to offer us.
In his pictures he tries to pass the same emotion that he had when he was shooting, alternatively he tries to create a pathos evocative, interpreting the image from his point of view. To obtain good results, he pays lots of attention to all parameters that compose the image: shapes, colours, composition, but above all, the light.
One of the Sperm whale images Franco took last year in Azores has been selected as a winner in the
OCEAN VIEWS 2008 PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITION.
