5 Essential Italy Photography Tips
I’ve been leading photography workshops in Italy since 2009. Here are five things I’ve learned while guiding beginner, intermediate, and advanced photographers through some of Italy’s most beautiful places.
1. Community Is Key
Keeping my groups to just seven students means that everyone gets to know each other well — and when that happens, sharing vision, insights, and discoveries comes naturally. That sense of community builds just as easily in the field while we’re photographing together as it does over a glass of wine after the light fades.
I’ve found that this environment is fertile ground for restoring creativity and building a new foundation for our creative lives. There’s something that happens when a small group of photographers is fully present in a place together — a kind of collective seeing that wouldn’t happen any other way.
2. Slow Is Good
The pace of Italian life tends to be slow — or at least slower than what most of us put ourselves through every day back home. And slowing down means we get to see more.
Many travelers try to cover so much ground in a day that they never really get a sense of where they are or what it actually feels like to be there. The itineraries I set for these workshops deliberately leave time for wandering, contemplating, and exploring — time to think about what our photographs mean and how they communicate that meaning. Slowing down, I’ve come to believe, is one of the essential keys to making great photographs.
3. Immersion Creates Intensity
These workshops are built around the idea of immersion — in photography and in Italy simultaneously — and what that immersion produces is an intensity of experience that’s hard to replicate any other way.
Your camera is in hand every waking moment. Because we base all of the workshops in towns and cities, with frequent trips into the countryside, Italian culture is literally at our doorstep. We’re not observing Italy from a distance. We’re inside it, living inside it, making photographs from inside it.
We live photography while we are living in Italy. That’s not a tagline — it’s simply what happens.
4. Storytelling Creates Focus
One of the things I work hardest on with workshop participants is getting them to think in terms of story when they make their photographs. When that shift happens — and it usually does, often partway through the first full day — the photographs get better, clearer, and more personal almost immediately.
Together we use our cameras to build stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That focus changes everything about the quality of the images my workshoppers make.
5. The Classroom Is Everywhere
I have taught photography for more than 40 years, and for most of that time my classroom had desks and chairs and a door that closed at the end of the period.
In Italy, my classroom is everywhere — in a hill town at dusk, in a vineyard at midday, at the breakfast table, on a street corner where the light is doing something extraordinary. Workshop participants get to experience the complete cycle: make photographs, look at those photographs together, then go back out and make more — informed now by the experience of looking, critiquing, and being guided.
That cycle, repeated daily in one of the most photographically rich places on earth, is what makes these workshops work.
A spot has just opened in the 2026 Tuscany Workshop — May 31 to June 7, based in Cortona. If you’ve been thinking about it, now is the moment.
