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.

The post 5 Essential Italy Photography Tips first appeared on PhotographItaly.

Take a look at the participants’ slideshows below—each link opens in a new tab.

Slideshow Links

Jayn | Rob | Gerry | Steve | Kathy

The post 2025 Italian Lakes Workshop Student Slideshows – Group 2 first appeared on PhotographItaly.

After a few days and nights on Lake Como, we moved west to Lake Maggiore, stopping first in Ticino, an Italian-speaking part of Switzerland with towering waterfalls and tiny villages constructed from the plentiful granite of the region. Once on Lake Maggiore, we visited the famed Borromean Islands, once part of the Grand Tour. We ate well, we drank great regional wines and we had a whole lot of fun, all while making photographs that told the story of this beautiful Italian area.

Take a look at the participants’ slideshows below—each link opens in a new tab.

Slideshow Links

Eric | Don 1 | Don 2 | Michelle | Jane | Ruth | Nancy

The post 2025 Italian Lakes Workshop Student Slideshows – Group 1 first appeared on PhotographItaly.

It was a phenomenal week filled with photography, food, wine, and the kind of camaraderie that only seems to happen when you’re traveling with other curious, creative people. We photographed our way through Arezzo, Anghiari, Montepulciano, Pienza, San Quirico d’Orcia, and beyond—but Cortona remained our home base. We climbed its steep hills daily and gratefully wandered its one flat street, affectionately called Ruga Piana—the “flat wrinkle.”

The group produced some beautiful photographic work and one participant also brought along a sketchbook and watercolors, blending media and ideas—sometimes letting photographs act as a starting point for painted impressions. All week long, we shared thoughtful conversations about image-making, about how our own lives inform what and how we photograph, and how storytelling weaves itself into every frame.

Take a look at the participants’ slideshows below—each link opens in a new tab.

Slideshow Links

Eric | Clark | Al | Lynn | Don #1 | Don #2

The post 2025 Tuscany Workshop Student Slideshows first appeared on PhotographItaly.

With each stop, we looked for stories — in light, in texture, in the rhythm of daily life — working to translate this ancient island into images that speak. A highlight: our visit to the Curto winery in Ispica, where winemaker Francesca Curto shared the rich legacy of her family’s craft. And of course, we ate very well — Pasta alla Norma, caponata, swordfish, tuna — the flavors of Sicily, captured one bite at a time.

Viva Sicilia!

Check out the participants’ slideshows via the links below – each will open in a new tab.

Slideshow Links

Eric | Delta | Genevieve | Anne | Neil

The post 2025 Sicily Workshop Student Slideshows first appeared on PhotographItaly.

The post Italy Photography Workshops 2025 first appeared on PhotographItaly.

Slideshow Links

Becky 1 | Becky 2 | James 1 | James 2 | Don 1 | Don 2

Jeff

The post 2024 – Cortona, Tuscany Workshop Student Slideshows first appeared on PhotographItaly.

In Tuscany!

Settle in to a beautiful Tuscan hill town for 5 days of critique of your images, exploration of your creative process, instruction in Adobe Lightroom and tips on getting your images out into the world.

Are you looking for:

•  In-depth critique of your work and suggestions on how to improve?
• Ideas and strategies to improve your creative mind?
• Time with like-minded photographers to discuss your work and theirs?
• Ways to start (and finish!) photographic projects?
• Instruction in Adobe Lightroom and other post-production strategies to enhance your creative workflow?
• A relaxing few days and nights in a beautiful little village in Tuscany’s Chianti region?

Join me and a small group of photographers June 10 to June 14 Click here for more information.

Tuscany Photographer’s Retreat

Only 2 Spaces Left – Click Here to Learn More & Reserve

Take time to slow down, take stock and learn.

It’s Chianti – of course there will be wine!

Retreat to Move Forward

Since 2009, I’ve been teaching photography workshops in Italy. Time and time again, my workshop participants have asked for more in-depth critique of their photographs, ideas on how to be more creative with their photography, how to get their work out into the public eye through books, exhibitions, publications and more, along with instruction in post-production software like Adobe Lightroom. This retreat is the answer to those requests.

The post Unlock Your Creative Mind first appeared on PhotographItaly.