Tuscany Photography and Travel Advice

This article is part of the Complete Guide to Photography in Tuscany

Tuscany is a tranquil photography destination, with gentle rolling hills, subtle colours and a thriving tourism industry focused on history, food and wine. The logistics of a Tuscany photography trip are relatively easy: there are plenty of places to stay and to eat, and a good network of roads for exploring the region. For some photography destinations (like Patagonia or Iceland), it helps to plan your journey around the more difficult terrain; in Tuscany, you can just arrive and start capturing the landscape. 

However, there are some ways to prepare for a Tuscany photography trip and get more out of your visit. This article is about the photography advice that will be most useful in Tuscany, and the tips that most first-time visitors should know. 

Focus on sunrise

There is often something to shoot in Tuscany, whatever the conditions or light, but the landscape is best at sunrise. The subtle colours and textures of the environment suit calmer tones in the sky, and the dramatic colours of sunset can clash with the atmosphere of the Tuscan landscape. Sunrise and sunset are usually the best times to be out with the camera wherever you are, but Tuscany is conspicuously better suited to the softer colours of sunrise.

If you visit in spring or autumn, you are most likely to get mist in the valleys early in the morning, adding another reason to be out before the sun comes up. The best time to arrive on location is at least 45 minutes before sunrise, and the gentle pre-dawn colours are often more impressive than the first light on the landscape. 

I’m generally not an enthusiastic morning person, and I struggle to get up early, even on a photography trip. At peak photography times in Tuscany (spring and autumn), photographing sunrise requires you to be on location by 5 am, which means an incredibly early start if you need to travel to a photography spot. However, the early morning has the best light for the landscape, and it’s worth investing in this time, even if you need to rest later and miss another part of the day. 

Look for dappled light

After sunrise, the best conditions for photographing Tuscany feature a layer of cloud with enough small gaps to let in bursts of light. Light shafts often appear in the afternoons (but sometimes in the morning), and can be the ideal feature to enhance your compositions.

Scenes from Tuscany often feature sweeping views of farmhouses and villas, with open landscapes of rolling hills scattered with villages and historic buildings. A good way to compose images is by isolating parts of these landscapes to create smaller scenes and simpler arrangements. Spotlights from the sun shining through gaps in the cloud can be ideal for highlighting and separating these features. 

Spotlights usually occur when the sun is lower in the sky (mid-morning or mid-afternoon), and there are small gaps in otherwise heavy cloud. Find a lookout with a clear view of the landscape pointing roughly towards the sun and watch for small patches of light moving across the scene. With the right conditions, dappled light can be as rewarding as sunrise in Tuscany, and it can help you get more from the landscape on an otherwise dull day. 

Consider black and white

Although we might focus most of our effort on sunrises or dappled light, many days in Tuscany are either bright and clear, or cloudy with flat light. Harsh light can be the most difficult to work with in photography, and a landscape that comes alive at sunset can often look dull in the middle of the day. 

Black and white photography can be a great way to avoid this problem and make the best use of challenging light. By removing colour as a feature, we can focus more on texture, pattern and brightness to guide a viewer around our image. A scene that appears uninteresting under heavy cloud can be striking and rich in black and white as we contrast soft textures in the sky with shapes in the landscape. 

While this approach can work anywhere, Tuscany is particularly well suited to black and white photography. Most of the region has historic villages and ancient buildings, old monuments and churches set among a landscape that hasn’t changed for hundreds of years. Black and white images can enhance this sense of a traditional landscape, and the soft textures in the rolling fields can be used in contrast with the harder lines of villas and isolated trees. 

Use a long lens

You can use a variety of lenses in Tuscany and vary your style to capture different views of the landscape, but a long lens can work particularly well. In landscape photography, long lenses are ideal for picking out small and distant scenes, simplifying a more complex location into a few elements that work well together. 

The terrain in Tuscany suits photography with a long lens. Many locations feature small lookouts with great views across the rolling hills stretching into the distance. These scenes can look incredible at wider angles, where you can capture the atmosphere of the whole landscape in a single frame. However, using a long lens to pick out smaller areas can provide dozens of options at each viewpoint, and it can be a great way to capture a set of images from a single spot. 

Long lenses work best during dappled light or on a misty morning. In both situations, the light and mist can separate features, allowing you to capture simplified parts of the landscape through a long lens. The light and mist usually move around the scene, revealing new compositions and different features as they go, constantly refreshing the options for new images.

Vary your approach and style

There are two collections of features around Tuscany: the rural landscape of rolling hills, villas and isolated trees; and the street scenes of historic villages, traditional buildings and vibrant cities. It’s the ideal destination for adjusting your style of photography to try something new and expand your range. 

Most of the landscape in Tuscany features small medieval villages set among traditional farmland and woods, which allows you to switch from one set of features to another very quickly. To stay fresh during the day, you can take some time out of the landscape to explore the streets of a nearby town, or spend the afternoon among cosy village streets and shoot the rolling hills at sunset. Whatever your preferred style of photography, Tuscany is the ideal landscape for testing your boundaries and learning something new. 

You can structure a whole trip around this variation and spend a portion of your visit in cities like Florence and Siena, with another section driving around the countryside of Val d’Orcia. By embracing the opportunity to learn and adjust your style, you can get more out of each day and develop your skills during your visit. 

Spent time exploring

There are some beautiful photography locations in Tuscany, and many have become well-known as images of the region are shared online. Most of us would recognise the landscape around Podere Belvedere or the shape of a particular clump of trees, even if we have never been to Italy. 

However, Tuscany is a particularly good place to create original compositions, and you should devote some time every day to finding something new. The landscape around the popular area of Val d’Orcia is full of rolling hills and traditional villas to combine into rural scenes. Some viewpoints have become better known than others, but there are so many to explore that you could spend an entire trip to Tuscany without visiting an established location and still return with an incredible set of original compositions. 

My favourite approach to exploring Tuscany is to spend sunrise at a familiar and reliable location, which will be easier to find in the dark and hopefully allow you to start the day with one or two great images. As the sun gets higher, you can spend some of the less-interesting light on exploring for new locations by heading down tracks and slowly investigating areas where you can stop and consider how the landscape might look in different conditions. 

The longer you spend in Tuscany, the more likely you are to discover new areas. Later in the trip, you can spend sunrise at the locations you scouted on previous days.

Travel beyond Val d’Orcia

Most photographers spend their time in Tuscany in the beautiful area of Val d’Orcia, where the landscape is stunning, and you can easily spend a week or two visiting well-known locations or uncovering new parts of the landscape. A visit that only covers Val d’Orcia can be incredibly rewarding, and you are likely to capture a great set of photographs without running out of new areas to explore. 

However, Tuscany is a large region with so much more to see. No other part of Tuscany is as rich with great photography locations as Val d'Orcia, but there are landscapes full of vineyards, fortified villages and vibrant cities to discover wherever you go. 

When planning your visit to Tuscany, consider your preference for reliable days of photography versus discovering new and original images. If you want each day to be full of great locations and stunning photographs, and are happy to accept repeating compositions that have come before, then focus more time in Val d’Orcia. If you don’t mind taking fewer images each day if they are more likely to be original, the best approach is to go beyond Val d’Orcia and spend more time exploring. 

There isn’t a correct way to spend your time enjoying photography, but this distinction will help you decide where to focus. 

Further photography advice for Tuscany

Tuscany is a reliable and rewarding photography location, which is easy to explore and fun to photograph. You can arrive in Val d’Orcia with very few plans and be sure to capture beautiful images of the landscape, or travel between the historic cities and encounter interesting scenes around every corner. 

However, the advice in this article will help you get more out of the light in Tuscany, and plan your days so you can spend more time in the landscape in the right conditions. The terrain and features of Tuscany are unlike any other photography destination, and adapting to the conditions and compositions that work will improve the image you can achieve on your visit. 

For more information to help you plan a photography trip to Tuscany, check out my complete guide to photography in Tuscany. I have also captured some of the best photography locations in Val d’Orcia and beyond in an article about Tuscany’s best photography spots.

For more information on planning a photography trip to Tuscany, with a detailed map of photography spots and other useful travel information, check out my Photography Travel Guide to Tuscany.