This Is Venice, Revealed One Frame at a Time
Venice Is a Living Paradox. Both Ancient and Ever-renewing.
Discover Venice as she truly is. Beyond the crowds, beyond the postcards.
Through the Leica SL3-S, the city reveals a world where light and water shape every moment, where love repeats itself across centuries, and where daily life unfolds inside walls that have witnessed a thousand years. This is Venice in her eternal present — mysterious, intimate and forever being reborn.
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City of Lovers
Venice has long been known as the city of lovers. Through the Leica viewfinder, moments of pure tenderness unfold: couples pausing for secret kisses in secluded courtyards, hands meeting as effortlessly as the tides along the canals, embraces drifting across waters that have carried centuries of devotion. The city casts a quiet spell over these small intimacies, granting them a feeling of both timeless grace and fleeting wonder, as though Venice herself gently arranges each moment into something luminous.
In quiet moments, reviewing the day's work in my hotel room, each frame tells its own story. Venice revealing herself slowly, one image at a time, between light and shadow, water and stone.
Steve McCurry
How to Create Images with Atmosphere
Atmospheric travel photography emerges from mindful observation and an intuitive sense of timing, along with a considered approach to perspective and exposure. Scenes such as quiet canals at dusk or subjects in narrow alleyways become especially powerful when you take your time and consciously incorporate the surroundings into your composition.
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Golden and Blue Hour in Venice
Blue hour and golden hour—the moments around sunrise and sunset—offer the ideal light for capturing water and urban architecture at their most atmospheric. The interplay of the remaining natural light and the city lights creates rich colours and contrasts that brings these scenes to life. The full-frame Leica SL3-S, paired with its L-Mount lenses, is engineered to excel in this kind of low-light environment, delivering exceptional clarity and detail.
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Lighting Challenges in Narrow Alleyways
In narrow alleyways, lighting conditions often change abruptly. The transition between bright daylight, shadow and artificial light sources can create significant differences in brightness. With travel photography, achieving correct exposure becomes particularly challenging. The Leica SL3-S and lenses are built to handle the rapid shifts in light. Its wide dynamic range and strong high-ISO performance help preserve fine tonal details. Paired with SL-Lenses, it reproduces details, colours, and even strong light–dark transitions cleanly, without unwanted fringing. This makes it possible to capture the atmosphere of these places with consistency.
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Photographing Water Reflections
Reflections from glass, cobblestones, or water surfaces can be intentionally incorporated to create additional layers within the composition. A slight underexposure helps preserve highlight detail in challenging scenes and keeps the atmosphere authentic. The SL3-S’s high dynamic range and the superior optics of the SL-Lenses are essential for achieving strong image quality and a refined final result.
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Emotions and Stories
Emotional images often emerge from unassuming moments. To capture these situations authentically, patience, a keen sense of observation, and good timing are essential. The Leica SL3-S delivers fast continuous shooting and accurate person and face detection, making it easy to focus quickly on movement or fleeting subjects and capture a sequence of images for later selection in the Leica FOTOS app. With adaptable zoom lenses, like the Vario-Elmarit-SL 24–90mm, it preserves the spontaneity of the scene while keeping image quality consistently high.
The Equipment Steve McCurry Uses
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Leica SL3-S
Shop nowSensor 24 megapixel full-frame sensor with fast hybrid autofocus and image stabilisation Video 6K Open-Gate (3:2) and 5.9K HDMI RAW video Viewfinder (EVF) 5,76 mio. dots OLED viewfinder with eyepiece made of high-quality coated glass lenses Material All-metal housing with IP54 ingress protection -
Vario-Elmarit-SL 24–90 f/2.8–4 ASPH.
Discover SL-LensesType Zoom lens 24–90mm f/2.8–4 with aspherical lens design Bayonet / Filter thread L-Mount bayonet / E82 Number of lenses / groups 18 / 15 Number of asph. surfaces / lenses 5 / 4 Weight 1,140 g
A Hidden World – A Rare Glimpse into Venetian Homes
Venice stands as a city unlike any other, still shaped by its history as a dominant force in international trade. The grandeur of that era lives on in the stately palaces rising from the lagoon, an ambitious creation in a place where building a city once seemed unthinkable. Yet the result is a landscape that feels almost otherworldly, a merger of stone and water that defies ordinary logic. Beyond the facades familiar to visitors lies another layer of Venice, concealed behind weathered doors. On rare occasions, access is granted to private homes where the city’s true character unfolds. Inside these interiors, time has a different rhythm. Contemporary life coexists with centuries-old architecture, and everyday rituals take place in rooms that seem to absorb and carry the echoes of generations past.
Behind the Scenes
Steve Is Giving Us Some Insights
What’s so special about the SL3-S?
It’s not about the number of pixels: it’s about camera and lens being able to faithfully reproduce the magic of the place through the vision of the photographer. In the narrow calli where light can shift from brilliant to shadow within a few steps, the SL3-S helped me capture Venice's subtle gradations of light and colours with remarkable clarity, its extended ISO range handling these extremes naturally.
What was the biggest challenge in Venice?
The real challenge was embracing Venice's unpredictability.
The city changes with every tide and every shift of light, and capturing that fleeting poetry demands absolute presence.
Some days felt like I was chasing the city, trying to freeze an emotion that was constantly dissolving into water and shadow.
Why Leica?
One of the main reasons I transitioned to Leica was the incredible lenses. There isn't a better lens made in the world. I really felt like I owed it to my photography to use this equipment.
About Steve McCurry
Steve McCurry was born in Philadelphia, USA, in 1950, and studied Film and Theatre Arts at Pennsylvania State University. The American photographer has been one of the most iconic voices in contemporary photography for more than 40 years, with scores of magazine and book covers, over a dozen books, and countless exhibitions worldwide. Most of his photographs are grounded in people: he looks for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a person’s face.
As a photographer and photojournalist, McCurry is best known for his iconic portrait Afghan Girl (1984), which appeared on the cover of National Geographic. His work spans conflicts, vanishing cultures, ancient traditions and contemporary life alike, yet always retains the human element.
In 1986, he became a full member of the renowned Magnum Photos agency and has received many accolades for his work, including four first-place awards in the World Press Photo Contest and his induction into the Leica Hall of Fame. He has also published more than 20 books showcasing his work.
