Dissecting Italy with highly selective cropping is an approach that makes your images more intimate. Less post-card-ish. Choosing this less-is-more attitude is a first step to showing your personal style in your travel images.
Here are some ideas that will help you get selective.
First you find yourself attracted to a door (we photographers have strange attractions), and you photograph the entire door. Next, you begin to dissect the door, seeing just parts of its frame, maybe a step or two. You make your image unique by selecting this more intimate view and you decide what will be the focal point. This soon becomes an exercise in graphic design and helps you become a more fluent designer.
If there are straight lines in your images, a door frame or window, it's important to position the camera’s sensor parallel with that wall. This way you avoid skewed lines, which are distracting.
Getting the camera square to a wall or a doorway, for me, often means lowering the camera to waist high, so you’ll see me in the most awkward crouching positions, focused on very mundane-looking walls and getting very funny stares from passers-by.
Often I find that it wasn’t the door at all that was attracting me, but the shadows falling across it or the texture and color of the surfaces. My favorite images usually come after studying and dissecting a scene for several minutes or more.
