Images of Italy: A Traveling Photographer’s Guide

Images of Italy: A Traveling Photographer’s Guide

by William Lulow

I have mentioned before on these pages, that making successful photographs while traveling is often very difficult. There are always snapshots and some of them can be quite good, but photographing places on a vacation is dependent on many things. The weather has to be ideal, the location has to be photogenic and, most importantly, the light has to be great! None of these things are often available whenever your tour or you, pass by an interesting sight. If you are touring, you have to make do with what you get at any point in time on your trip.

The best way to get truly stunning images requires the photographer to experience a place at various times of the year and times of day as well. If you are touring, you do not have that luxury, so you need to train your eye to recognize scenes that are photogenic like this one I made recently in Maiori, Italy on the Amalfi coast:

When I shoot in color, I am always looking for the colorful. Sounds like a given, but sometimes you have to enhance the colors to make them “pop” a bit more. This I do in post-production with the aid of the “Vibrance-Saturation” tool in Photoshop.

There are scenes that cry out to be made in color as well as those where Black&White would be better:

This image of a monochrome tiled sidewalk in Maiori, Italy, with building balconies, just lent itself to this kind of a representation. I darkened the sky a bit to add some drama to it.

These images, made “on the run” so to speak, illustrate the point that touring photographers need to be searching for light and its effects constantly. The other way to do this is to go to one spot that has photogenic possibilities and sit there for a while, or go back many times to catch the changing light. This is something that tourists can never do! The nature of touring is to see different places, sometimes with the same light. If the day is cloudy, you will capture that kind of light. If it is sunny, you will capture THAT light. So you need to be on the lookout for subjects that kind of go with the light that nature hands you AT THAT TIME.

Here are some more touring images:

Our tour leader, Francine di Tomaso. Amalfi, Italy, June 2, 2025:

Amalfi, Italy. June 2, 2025:

Amalfi, Italy, June 2, 2025:

Amalfi, Italy. June 2, 2025:

Ravello, Italy. Juned 2, 2025:

On this day of touring, I actually carried two lenses with me, my standard 20mm f/2.8 and my 85mm f/1.8, medium telephoto. I thought I might want to get some pictures of some distant buildings, but still wanted to be far enough away to allow for some cropping. The Black&White image above I thought worked better in shades of gray because the color image was too splashy.

More images to come.