Translating a Summer Feeling with Panoramic Film

Italy overflows with culture, unique landscapes and beauty. It’s a country that offers so much to photographers that it can feel overwhelming. In my original list (before departure) of things to photograph one crucial thing was missing, something I only realised once my feet touched the ground in Italy. It was something that I felt and couldn’t have predicted beforehand. It was the feeling of summer, the people of Italy live and breath it. The colour, the stillness, the noise that somehow becomes a soft wash in the background, it all feels part of summer. This trip became an attempt to capture a feeling, and I wanted to translate that feeling through the Hasselblad XPan with the 45mm and 90mm lenses..

The feeling was hard to grasp, it was a combination of simple things, obvious to some and missed by others. This project became a quiet attempt to express how Italy feels, not just how it looks, in summer.

Framing Italy Through the XPan

I visited places that are photographed a lot, like Cinque Terre. A place that looks like it was designed for postcards: villages clinging to steep cliffs, houses painted in saturated colour, fragments of train lines and pathways stitched between rock and sea. It is a dream to photograph, but that is also the difficulty: you are working in scenes that have been photographed countless times.

The reality is that you tend to take the same photographs like others, and that is okay. Once you have those, you can build on top, find new meanings, and chase the feeling those places evoke.

The additional constraint of the panoramic format that is available through the Hasselblad Xpan does make me look differently at scenes. Not every “standard” postcard fits the wide format. By fully dedicating to panoramic format I removed myself from falling into the standard imagery.

The panoramic format of the Hasselblad XPan forced me to look differently at scenes. Not every classic view fits the wide frame. By fully committing to the panoramic ratio, I stepped away from the standard imagery. I became curious about what would happen if I stopped chasing novelty and instead searched for new ways to see familiar places that radiated the Italian summer. The 65:24 frame encouraged exactly that: it demanded cleaner compositions, more restraint, and a different kind of attention to how people and shapes spread out across the scene.

Beyond the Postcards

Italy readily hands you the classic images: grand Tuscan hills, ancient Roman ruins, the textbook blue of the Ligurian Sea. Those are always there, almost whether you look for them or not. After capturing the standards postcards or at least some of them, my vision of what I actually take home became more apparent. I was chasing were the in‑between moments:

• Quiet in the chaos
• The refreshing dive
• The laughs

Rather than using the panoramic format for grander landscapes, I wanted my images to sit closer to a way of life. They needed to feel simple, almost timeless, frames where you could hear the joy of summer just by looking. That meant letting life and landscape intermingle in the frame: people small in the distance, sea and rock occupying part of the space, a sense that the scene could have been photographed yesterday or twenty years ago.

Leaning into the midday sun

These summer feelings exist all day. Whilst I tend to limit myself to shoot during “optimal” times of the day, which for me is mostly during sunset or with sunrise, but for this project, the spirit of summer revealed itself at any hour. Limiting yourself to the bookends of the day can mean missing another side of a place. So I made a point to shoot at midday.

In Italy, the high sun can erase soft shadows and replace them with hard, graphic contrast. This can be unforgiving in colour. However, it also highlights something new, people withdraw to the shade during noon and the streets become empty. For these conditions, I used Kodak Portra 100 and 400.

Waiting for the Right People in the Frame

One of my favourite images for the series was made on a crowded beach, with a mass of people swimming. The kind of scene that I typically avoid, because in real life, it can feel chaotic, noisy and a little overwhelming. In real life, they feel chaotic and noisy, but for a series about summer, that very chaos felt essential.

Summer, for me, is not just sunlight, it involves laughter, splashes of water, and the half-heard fragments of conversation that blur into white noise. Yet, indistinct, but vital to the feeling of the scene. My goal was to capture an image that almost transmitted those sounds. Whilst looking at the imgae  where you could imagine the movement, the joy, the warmth.

I started wide, but quickly noticed that there was too much happening.  Moving closer allowed the figures to take shape, yet there were still enough people for no single subject to dominate. In the panoramic frame, and especially at a distance through the 90mm, those figures became almost painterly.

It was early afternoon, shot on Kodak Portra 160, with the sun still high enough for the contrast to become brutal. However, reflective walls on either side filled in shadows, balancing the light beautifully.

Cinque Terre as a Panoramic Canvas

Much of this series was photographed along the paths and viewpoints around Cinque Terre, though in hindsight, it could have been made almost anywhere along the Italian coast. That was intentional. I wanted only subtle hints of location to remain while expressing the broader feeling of an Italian summer.

The aim was not nostalgia but timelessness. A series of photographs that are hard to pin to a particular year, ones that could belong to any recent decade. The XPan’s wide aspect ratio helped here, stretching scenes just enough that they started to feel like stills from a film rather than traditional travel snapshots.

About Tom Kluyver

Through his journey as a full-time photographer, Tom Kluyver has found that true creative freedom lies in embracing the constraints of film and the panoramic format, a path that has shaped his unique style and storytelling. Find another article of Tom’s about the Philippines here or one about Norwegian fjords here. You can see more of his work on his instagram and portfolio website.

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