Rocco Galatioto, nice photos and good food

There's a magic to Coney Island in the winter. Only a few sun worshipers hang around and the ares has a eerie feel to it. The mere 4 mega pixels of this old gem hold up pretty well.

Shot at an awards ceremony for the Walter K Hoerning Fund. An organization that helps inner city boys with all sorts of enrichment programs and support. The lens was the Canon 24-105 F4 L.

hot with the Voigtlander 15mm lens on the E Pl-2. It was a Sunday afternoon as the warm light attests.

The local feasts in NY are a throw back to the old country. This photo was taken on Sullivan Street at the St. Anthony Feast. The lens was the Nikkor 35-135 F3.5-4.5.

Florentine roofs, shot with the Canon 5-D and the 24-85 F 3.5-4.5 EF lens.

This was my reply on fb of a post about the new digital Polaroid that my daughter had actually put up: Very "Polaroid." I was always amazed at the fact that you could have an "instant" print from a shot. In the so called "old days," I had an old Polaroid black and white that I used as a test shot camera. Once the studio lights were set up, a... Polaroid was taken - this camera had f-stops and aperture settings along with a PC plug [not a computer but an outlet to connect the flash] and then one could tell where the shadows were. Today with digital it's so easy that it's not fun anymore. I loved Polaroid cameras but the film was so expensive that their use was kept to a minimum. With the SX 70 [the color model] a whole genre developed of people who shot on Polaroid. They had only one shot per image and that made that image unique. Because of this, such shooters fancied themselves more artistic than those of us who shot on film and had negatives. I s...

In Washington Square park, of course. An amazing site of incredible surprises.

This is what we do as photographers. This is really what makes this whole genre so fascinating, so unusual. A two dimensional image lacking that fourth dimension, time, that captures an instant in the time-space continuum. An unique instant. I was recently at the Met to see the Exhibit on Steiglitz, Strand and Steichen and was mesmerized at these photos of New York in the twenties. Some were almost contemporary. But a photo of large buildings made me stop and think about the lives that were being lived by the myriad of people inside these structures. All had come to work that day probably on the subway; all had returned home to their daily chores; all had needs, desires hopes and differing opinions. Yet that photo froze all of these people forever. It was the same with photos of a street scene with people all walking and going their separate ways. All looked important and serious in what they were doing and being New Yorkers all seemed to be in a hurry. But where did they go right afte...

These are from the Cherry Blossom Festival hela annually at the Brooklyn Botanic. The lens was the Nikkor 24-85 F2.8-4.

This will hopefully irate those pretentious fools who call themselves "photographers" and think of themselves as "artists." Really? An expensive camera doesn't make one a photographer nor an artist. The whole of photography as "art" is still a moot point. The jury has not come out yet. Mow that I have taken this off my chest, and having taken a deep breath, I can go on. What gets me totally nuts is those who call themselves "fine art photographers" and practice "fine art photography." What is this kind of photography? Just because one uses a large format camera or nowadays, a medium format digital camera with a ridiculous number of mega pixels and takes some panorama, that particular shot isn't necessarily fine art or even art. Just because one spends countless hours using photoshop creating endless layers and adjustments, the result isn't necessarily a work of art. So the sad truth to these pretentious self inflated types ...