Nikolay St. Dimitrov Photography

I grew up in the exceptionally beautiful historic village of Zheravna, in the Municipality of Kotel, where I attended the local school through the 7th grade. I believe Zheravna, with its rich history, beautiful traditional wooden houses, the only art gallery in a village in Bulgaria, and vibrant cultural life, was one of the major influences that shaped my appreciation for art and beauty.

Photography and I became friends in the 4th grade, when I started carrying around my father's FED-4, a pretty decent camera for its time. By the 7th grade, I already had my own camera — a Soviet-made ZENIT 11.

In the 9th grade, while attending the Language High School in Sliven, I won my first international award at a student photography competition in Leningrad, USSR.

I have been working professionally since 1999, when I started working in book publishing, design, and prepress, followed shortly afterwards by web design and development, where photography naturally became an integral part of my business.

During the early years of the new millennium, I mainly photographed interiors and products, with very few people in front of my camera. Around 2010, I began focusing extensively on portrait and fashion photography — genres that require excellent communication with models and the ability to work with multiple light sources and lighting modifiers.

Wedding photography came about quite naturally after I photographed several weddings for relatives and friends. I became particularly interested in it because it allowed me to put into practice the knowledge and skills I had acquired across all the photographic genres I'd worked in over the years. Photographing one wedding per week (I had set this limit for myself because I had other commitments as well) also gave me the opportunity to gain experience in documentary photography, a genre in which I had relatively little experience at the time.

When I'm not photographing, I keep myself busy with several other activities: I run an online store, create industrial designs for new products, and develop custom websites from scratch — without ready-made components, optimized for maximum security, SEO, and performance. I don't use pre-built code, and I avoid libraries wherever possible. This website, for example, is entirely my own work, written from scratch.

I graduated from the Language High School in Sliven, where I studied French and English. My university degree is in economics, and during the COVID period, I took the opportunity to earn the title of "Software Engineer" in Python and JavaScript from SoftUni, Sofia — although PHP remains the language I write most often now.

Besides Bulgarian, I speak English and French at a decent level.