I've been photographing professionally since 2007 — product work in London, then architecture and hospitality in Italy, where I'm based today. What I bring to a property isn't local knowledge: it's a method. A sun study before the scout, a room-by-room shooting schedule, light rebuilt when the room doesn't offer its own. It works the same whatever the building is and wherever it stands.
In 2010, Lonely Planet Magazine UK sent me to photograph a masseria in the Sicilian countryside. The estate had been seized from the mafia and rebuilt as a B&B — the same stone walls, an entirely different life inside them.
It was my first hospitality assignment, and the one that set the direction. Standing in those rooms, I understood that photographing a property is not the same as photographing a building. A room is just a room until you know what happened in it. Then the light falls differently, and so does the frame.
Every property gets a location scout before the shoot, and a sun study before that. Orientation, window aspect and the path of the sun across the building tell me which hour each individual room looks like itself — a west-facing suite and the breakfast room are rarely at their best on the same morning. That work turns into a shooting schedule precise enough that a property knows, room by room, when the shoot will be in it and for how long.
Natural light comes first, always. When a room doesn't offer the light it deserves, I don't settle for what's there and I don't flatten it with flash: I rebuild the light. Continuous sources go both inside the room and outside it — beyond the windows, on the terrace, in the corridor — so what reaches the frame reads as daylight or evening light arriving from where it ought to. Continuous rather than strobe because I need to see the atmosphere I'm building while I build it, not discover it afterwards.
I shoot medium format digital — Fujifilm GFX and Hasselblad H systems. In a hotel room that matters for two concrete reasons. The files hold up at the sizes a property actually prints, from a double-page spread to a wall panel in the lobby. And the tonal range holds detail in a bright window and in a dark corner within the same frame, which is precisely the problem interiors set you.
The team is sized to the brief. Most shoots run with an assistant, kept deliberately light so a working property stays undisturbed — guests, service and kitchen carry on around us. When a project calls for more, typically structured video alongside the stills, I bring in the crew it needs. Since 2023 I've also worked as director of photography on advertising campaigns distributed across Europe, so the step up to a full video production is familiar ground.
Most projects run alongside the client's marketing team, who know what the images have to do once they leave me. Delivery is normally 7 to 15 days from the shoot date.
None of this is local knowledge. The same study, the same schedule and the same approach to light apply whether the property is a resort I know well or a hotel I'm walking into for the first time, in a country I've never worked in.
I spent four years working in London, most of them freelance. In 2013 I joined iHeartStudios as a product photographer, shooting thousands of luxury goods for Harrods.
Product work at that level is unforgiving: the object has no context to hide behind, no golden hour to wait for, and every flaw in the lighting is the only thing anyone sees. It taught me the discipline I still bring into a hotel room — that a frame is finished when there is nothing left to remove from it, not when there is nothing left to add.
I started out shooting stock — thousands of frames, no client, no brief, only the discipline of making an image that has to work on its own, with nothing to explain it.
Over the years the work narrowed. First food, then architecture. Two demanding disciplines with almost nothing in common: one lives on texture, steam and a window of a few minutes; the other on structure, proportion and the hour the sun clears the facade.
Hospitality is where they meet. A hotel is a building you photograph like architecture and a breakfast you photograph like food — and the guest experiences both as a single thing. Very few photographers do both properly. That's the ground I've chosen to stand on.
Back in Italy, the two threads ran side by side for years: private villas for luxury rental agencies in Sicily, and commissions for architects whose work was published in the architecture and interiors press. Villas taught me the guest's eye — what a person needs to see before they'll book a place they've never stood in. Architects taught me the builder's eye. A hotel needs both.
In 2016 Booking.com commissioned me to photograph a city guide to Palermo — an entire destination rather than a single property. A useful reminder that a place is sold the same way a room is: one honest frame at a time.
Antonio D'Anna — photographer & founder, Zolfo Studio
Based in Palermo. Working wherever the work is.Hotels, boutique properties, resorts and their restaurants — across Italy and internationally.