Italy is the most picture-perfect place to hone your photography skills. Photo / Getty Images
Tuscany is the most picture-perfect place to hone your photography skills and you’ll discover a side to Italy few other tourists experience, writes Dianne Bortoletto
Italy is a country that captures travellers’ hearts, but I was on a mission to capture Italy.
For that, a professional was required. After much googling and asking my travel writer and photographer mates, I emailed a friend of a friend, Italian photographer and educator Ugo Cei to inquire about a private photography tour.
Photography is a passion. With my Canon R6 and 26-105mm standard kit lens, and a new Peak Design travel tripod, I had the gear, but little idea. My goal: elevate my travel photography so my pictures can be published alongside my words.
Ugo offers both private tours as well as group tours, including to the Dolomites, Milan, Venice during Carnivale, Tuscany, Umbria, Rome, Puglia, Sicily, Scotland and Turkey. Based on my short window of time and my disdain for cold weather, we agreed on two and half days in Tuscany. Ugo sent through some accommodation options and set a meeting point that was mutually convenient.
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Ugo and wife Marilena collected me from a regional train station in Emilia Romagna. Our two-hour drive along the autostrada turned into three with more stops and starts than a game of rugby league. Traffic was heavy.
From the back seat, I could see the sky glowing magnificent shades of yellow, orange and red. Eventually, Ugo conceded that there was no chance we were going to catch the sunset given our distance from San Quirico d’Orcia, our Tuscan village base for the next two nights.
Located in Val d’Orcia, which was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2004 and is also rated as one of Italy’s most picturesque landscapes, San Quirico d’Orcia is enchanting. Surrounded by a medieval wall, it has one main pedestrianised cobbled street lined with colourful buildings, and a population of just 2500.
The landscapes of the Val d’Orcia have become the quintessential image of Tuscany. Endless rolling green pastures, a horizon of hills where the light dances with shadows in and out of dips, and views of stone farmhouses on summits with snaking gravel driveways lined with pencil-shaped pines. Plenty of worthy vistas for the avid photographer.
The scene of Maximus’ death in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator was filmed in Val d’Orcia, just outside of Pienza. Ugo took me to the place of Maximus’ home, where he had visions of his wife and son running towards him along a country gravel road lined with cypress trees as he took his last breath. The location was every bit as heavenly in real life as it was in the movie.
The location is near Agriturismo Terrapile and the local council has since prohibited access to it by car due to the influx of influencers. After parking close to Pieve di Corsignano church, my camera slung around my shoulders, we walked some 20 minutes up and down a hilly gravel road in the midday sun to reach the vantage point.
I found an interesting foreground of yellow wildflowers and waited for the people walking up the driveway to be visible, and continued to happily snapped away.
Our first photoshoot was earlier that morning to capture the sunrise at Podere Belvedere, about one kilometre from San Quirico d’Orcia. The large two-storey stone farmhouse is surrounded by cypress pines and sits on top of a hill in a sea of undulating terrain. It’s a popular photography stop.
According to Ugo, “witnessing an autumn sunrise when the early morning fog, lingering at the bottom of the valley, glows under the rays of the rising sun, is a perfect moment to freeze in time. It is the very reason for photographing Tuscany.”
We walked along a newly ploughed field to find a place to set up our tripods.
“A good tripod is just as important, perhaps even more important, than the camera,” Ugo said.
“When using a slower shutter speed in lower light, you need your camera to be absolutely still, and you don’t want your expensive camera sitting on an unstable tripod.”
This made me feel justified for splurging on my new sticks.
Then Ugo almost whispered, “Okay, this is where I share my dirty photography secrets.” His secrets were music to my ears.
Ugo explained he shoots most of his landscape photos in AV mode, or aperture priority mode. In basic terms, it is the mode where the photographer controls the depth of field (the f-stop number), and the camera takes care of the rest.
“I would keep this on f/8 and increase the ISO,” Ugo said.
I snapped a couple of photos and showed him. He nodded and suggested framing the farmhouse a little lower in my grid.
We spent a couple of hours there and I took around 300 photos as the sun rose, changing the dark sky into a yellowy-orange light source. The gentle morning mist was barely visible in the valley behind the farmhouse and the mountains in the distance varied in shape and differing shades of blue-grey.
Our second sunrise shoot the following day wasn’t as successful. We waited for close to three hours in pea-soup conditions, hoping the thick fog would lift before calling defeat.
Making the most of my time with Ugo, I quizzed him on camera gear, post-processing programs (he favours Lightroom), how he organises his photos, his favourite place to take photos (The Dolomites) and every other question that came to mind.
His calm and reassuring nature meant I never felt silly for asking the most basic questions.
Our sunset shoot was just outside of Pienza. By total accident, I photographed a car driving past using a slow shutter speed and squealed when I saw the result – a light trail. There and then Ugo decided we would focus on light trails as my lens wasn’t powerful enough to capture a castle in the distance in the low light.
As each car turned the bend, I experimented with different settings in TV mode, the mode that allows the photographer to control shutter speed, resulting in a blurred and more elongated tail, or sharper light trail. It was a lot of fun. After a couple of hours, we ventured back to San Quirico and feasted on Bistecca alla Fiorentina, Tuscany’s famous steak from the Chianina breed of cattle, washing it down with Chianti, then ending the meal with biscotti dipped in vin santo.
The weekend was part photography mentoring, which was exactly what I was looking for, with the added and unexpected bonus of being private tour visiting monuments and towns that I never would’ve been able to reach on my own.
We visited Bagno Vignoni, famous for its thermal baths. He also took me to Pienza, Monteriggioni, Baccoleno, Poggio Covili, Horti Leonini, a perfect example of a manicured Italian garden, I Cipressini and Quercia delle Checce, which at about 400 years old and branches spanning 20m, is the oldest oak tree in Tuscany.
My confidence in using my camera increased and I had the most enjoyable weekend in the company of Ugo and his affable wife Marilena. What started as professional development to capture Tuscany netted a newly formed friendship.
For more information about Ugo Cei’s photography tours, visit tours.ugoceiphotography.com
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